Modern Ambition & Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood
A sense of inevitability hangs heavy over Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, a fitting mood for a novel that takes its name and inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Birnam Wood is a novel about the future, and those who seek to gain some control over it. By the end you do wonder whether there is any control to be gained at all.
In her Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, Catton took us to the New Zealand of the 1800s. Birnam Wood is a novel very much concerned with the New Zealand of the now, complete with surveillance drones and the ever-present threat of climate change. Birnam Wood is the name chosen by a guerrilla gardening collective led by Mira Bunting, with the aim to live as much as possible outside of the framework of capitalism. Volunteers come and go, working alongside their day jobs to plant crops in areas of arable land – on the sides of streets, in abandoned lots – sometimes engaging in light criminal activity by using land without permission. But the group struggles with their own lofty aims: if they want to reach self-sufficiency, they may need to adapt to the same system they disavow.
An opportunity comes from an unexpected place, and an unexpected person: a seemingly abandoned farm in Thorndike, walled in by an avalanche, and an inscrutable American billionaire, Robert Lemoine. When Mira runs into Lemoine – who is in the midst of constructing a survivalist bunker – on a scouting trip for new locations, he seems intrigued by Birnam Wood’s work, and suggests an unofficial partnership. Mira’s second-in-command, Shelley, sees the benefit in working with Lemoine, but aspiring journalist and ex-Birnam Wood member Tony Gallo is appalled at the idea of making a deal with the devil. This deal between Mira (and her collective) and Lemoine is the meat of Birnam Wood – the clash between these idealistic, anti-capitalist individuals, and the archetypal billionaire.
Eleanor Catton
Catton is an attentive, careful writer, making sure to provide just enough detail so her characters never come across as caricatured. We are introduced to rich inner lives, and are offered a view into their ways of thinking. What this results in is a world that is engrossing and believable – but it is also consistently funny. Birnam Wood is sharp and satirical, approaching its subject matter and its characters with respect, but unafraid to highlight the irony inherent in their political entanglements, and their confused personal moralities. Mira grows up “with a stout faith in the proven clarity of right and wrong”, but she’s increasingly drawn to Lemoine, despite the fact that his very existence as a billionaire goes against what she believes in. Tony holds fast to his personal morals: suspecting the validity of the story Lemoine has told Mira, he embarks on a one-man journey to uncover the truth. When he stumbles upon what he thinks is a grand conspiracy, Tony’s first response is anger and despair. And then, when that settles, he thinks: “I am going to be so fucking famous.” Characters may have the courage of their convictions, but Catton makes sure we’re well aware of how flawed those convictions can be.
Lemoine, as a character, is perhaps the closest to a caricature, but even his calculating, manipulative hunt for money rings true, with a cold sort of humour (“a large proportion of the world’s billionaires were psychopaths”, Mira thinks, after she first meets him). Revealed to us early on – but not to anyone else – is Lemoine’s actual work on the Thorndike farm: the illegal drilling of national parkland, for mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars. Here, Catton draws from real-life New Zealand history: in 2010, a government plan proposed mining national parks; it met with local and global protest and was eventually scrapped. While Mira and Birnam Wood strive to regain the possibility of a future – wresting back control from a previous generation, governments, late-stage capitalists – Lemoine is setting himself up for a future that includes him and only him. The climate crisis is one characterised by a diffusion of responsibility, and it’s sharply ironic to see Mira, Shelley, and Tony disagree about the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to combat it while Lemoine chases profit with no qualms about the effect of his actions.
In a video for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Catton reflects on “...how quick we are to diagnose Macbeth-like qualities in our political enemies, and how seldom we identify Macbeth-like qualities in ourselves.” Despite occupying different political positions, the characters of Birnam Wood have more in common than they think. Catton cleverly uses Macbeth and its themes as inspiration, rather than as a blueprint. Macbeth finds no direct counterpart here. Instead, we are introduced to multiple contenders for the role, in people like Mira, Lemoine, and Tony: characters who are emboldened by their ambition, and weakened by it at the same time. Their goals are very different – money, fame, a sense of moral righteousness – but the truth remains the same: they are each, believably, the Macbeth of their own story.
In their race to the crown (in whatever form it takes), Birnam Wood’s characters often appear to be assessing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, as if to find something that they can use to their advantage – always trying, in some way, to have the upper hand. This is true of larger political concerns, but also of the smaller interactions that make Birnam Wood so rich – we see it in the rivalry that develops out of Mira and Shelley’s strained friendship; we see it in the interactions between once-lovers Tony and Mira. In terms of control, Lemoine appears to have the largest advantage – working in drone manufacturing, surveillance is second nature to him. He clones phones, sends and un-sends messages as other people, uses his drones to track people he perceives as possible threats. But the all-seeing eye of the camera can’t see everything, no matter how much it tries. The simple truth is that no matter how much Lemoine can see, he cannot predict human behaviour.
In fact, this is how Catton maintains momentum in Birnam Wood, in a structure that allows the novel to move forward so grippingly: through misjudgements and misunderstandings. Birnam Wood unfolds as a series of interlocked narratives, where we see a scene through one character’s eyes, and then switch to another, only to discover that what the former character took for granted is actually entirely off the mark. In our first introduction to Shelley, we see her closely watching a yellow circle representing Mira move on a map app; just a few pages later, Mira refers to the same app as something she and Shelley “had both installed some months ago, and never used”. These small misunderstandings snowball into larger and larger ones. Catton executes this effortlessly, sometimes starting switches in perspective at a point just a few minutes before the last one ended, allowing us to see the same moment through two prisms of experience. Control over other people is more elusive than characters may hope.
Starting off as a satirical, slow-paced examination of our political sphere, Birnam Wood becomes, in its final act, a fast-paced thriller where the stakes keep rising. It is almost delightful to watch Catton unravel her carefully woven web. There’s a constant sense of surprise, as the reader discovers more information with each perspective shift – who actually has the upper hand? Is there any control to be gained? Not for these characters. That’s their failing point: the illusion that they can command authority over their future. These characters are all barrelling towards an ending that is inevitable, born out of their own actions and choices. Eleanor Catton is the only one truly in control, and we are along for the ride.
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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.
