Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever Booker Prize winner. Photo by Murdo MacLeod
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
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Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever Booker Prize winner. Photo by Murdo MacLeod
Katy Hayes
New Zealander Eleanor Catton came to prominence in the literary world in 2013 when she became the youngest ever winner of the Booker Prize at the age of 28. The Luminaries was an 832-page sprawling Victorian pastiche set during the goldrush in New Zealand and was her second novel.
How do you follow up this level of spectacular success? The answer for Catton was: very slowly. She has spent some of the intervening decade writing for the screen, including adapting her own novels and now, 10 years later, her third novel finally appears. It is very different: at 423 pages, it is a good length, but not unusual. It is also very contemporary. You can see the influence of certain American writers, like Jonathan Franzen, who produce hefty novels of social concern, with moral purpose and strong storylines.
There are two ways to describe Birnam Wood: a pacy thriller where a group of young idealists stumble upon a criminal mining enterprise; or a clever literary pitting of millennial purity against Gen X exploitation and boomer complacency. Either way, this is a cracking read that compels as much as it provokes.
The action unfolds in 2017. Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening collective that operates around Christchurch in New Zealand. They descend on deserted or underused patches of land, plant crops, harvest them and distribute the produce. It’s all intense consensus activism, informed by a millennial left-liberal social bond.
Its two leaders, Mira Bunting and Shelley Noakes, are beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Mira, a dominating go-getter, is full of ideas and the low-key Shelley has always followed along. Mira has a new enterprise: a more ambitious invasion of a 153-hectare disused farm further south. It is owned by a mature couple, the recently knighted Owen Darvish and his wife Jill. The farm is near the fictional town of Thorndike, in the shadow of the fictional national park of Korowai. This enterprise would take Mia and Shelley’s hobby organisation onto a more sustainable level. On a surreptitious visit to the Darvish farm, Mira stumbles into American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who has made his fortune in the manufacture of surveillance drones. He declares himself part-owner of the untilled farm and offers to fund Birnam Wood. A “doomsday libertarian survivalist”, he intends to build an underground bunker on the land, or so he says.
A former member of Birnam Wood, Tony Gallo, returning after a four-year absence, attends the general meeting and sneers at this idea. He is an aspiring journalist, still drenched in the absolutist idealism of Birnam Wood’s founding impulses, and smells a giant eco-destroying, tech-billionaire-shaped rat.
The Birnam Wood crowd descend on the farm to plant mixed vegetables, while Tony follows after to spy, convinced something nefarious is going on. Turns out he is not wrong. We learn early on that Lemoine has a secret mining operation in the National Park hills above the farm, harvesting “rare-earth elements”, scarce metals needed for technological components, in short supply in western countries in a market dominated by China.
The plot is as twisty as a tuber root, with jump scares, unexpected visitors, and a conniving psychopathic intelligence arranging events. There is also a layer of sexual tension, as Mira is always alert to the attractions of men, with beta-girl Shelley sniffing about in her wake.
A terrific element in the novel is the amount of tech surveillance. This theme is signalled early on; Shelley has a location tracker on her phone for Mira as she cycles about planting seditious root veg. But the spying rises up several notches as the novel progresses, and only the paranoid Tony has a grasp on how to keep himself invisible in a world full of heat-detecting drones and hacked phones.
The writing style is conventional and clever; the story unfolds as an omniscient narrative, following first one thread, then another, giving insight and perspective on what is going on for each character, with the point of view shifting gracefully.
Catton is merciless in her exposure of personality flaws. Tony’s idealist pursuit of the truth is accompanied by a self-obsessed desire for fame as a journalist: “I am going to be so f***ing famous”.
Shelley’s jealousy of Mira results in a sneaky sexual betrayal. Jill and Owen Darvish have a good marriage and are good parents, but lazily move in a morally impervious stew of smugness and self-satisfaction.
Catton has a lot of fun with her plot — the story has the shape of a movie thriller. But her main concern is a stern indictment of the legacies left by the boomers and Generation Xers who are asset-stripping the world that they are leaving to the millennial generation. The Darvishes are smug, unruffled boomers; Robert Lemoine is the psychopathic, earth-robbing Gen Xer, using the technological revolution to advance himself, not just in competing for resources but in greedily grabbing them all for personal enrichment. The Birnam Wood collective are the millennials, idealistic and consensus-building.
This is the work of a 30-something literary fighter. The generations just preceded, the boomers and Xers, have plundered the earth and pocketed the gains. And while the Birnam Wood collective are satirised for their “suffocating moral censure” it’s clear where Catton’s sympathies lie. She is with them, these young moralists. She knows who is to blame and is confident here in pointing the finger.
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This book is a triumphant retort to the generations of earth-strippers and self-enrichers, a social polemic sheathed in the cloak of a pacy thriller. Catton is a writer with a clear moral purpose: happy to entertain but even happier when throwing a well-written, well-aimed punch.