BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Birnam Wood, a Novel (Eleanor Catton, author)
Literary fiction, eco-justice, New Zealand, sustainable farming, artificial intelligence, drones, crime.
BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Birnam Wood, a Novel (Eleanor Catton, author)
In Shakespeares’ masterpiece, The Scottish Play (also known as Macbeth), spirits assure the titular overly ambitious nobleman that Macbeth “shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill [the site of Macbeth’s castle] shall come against him.” Macbeth erroneously presumes his safety, never imagining that Birnam Wood could move toward his home. And yet, it does.
The billionaire villain in Birnam Wood, Robert Lemoine, makes similar fatal assumptions based on his seemingly endless wealth and his vast technological empire. Birnam Wood is a bit of an off-beat read. Set in New Zealand, in an area known as the Korowai Pass and wilderness area, the novel highlights the eco-justice (sometimes eco-terrorism) activities of a “guerilla” gardening cooperative with a mission to plant sustainable foods and other plants on properties that otherwise stand fallow. The group’s activities generate food for those in need and restorative gardening and recycling benefits to the ecosystem. The group’s methods are often questionable and at times illegal (trespassing and various degrees of theft), but their methods are radically democratic and philosophically admirable, most of the time.
When the group learns of a large parcel of private property that will lie fallow for months if not years, due to a landslide cutting off much of the access to it, it jumps into action. Unbeknownst to the activists at the Birnam Wood collective, another opportunist, Lemoine, has covert operations underway on the same property, under cover of nebulous discussions about purchasing the land from its current owner in order to build himself an end-of-days underground bunker. In fact, Lemoine is secretly and illegally mining precious metals and minerals from the property without the knowledge or consent of the owner. He sees the activists as convenient cover for his operations and proposes that he provide funding to help them scale their operations. Unbeknownst to both Lemoine and Birnam Wood, a disaffected member of the group and would-be journalist is on the site investigating for his claim-to -fame journalism article and is gathering evidence of Lemoine’s illegal mining activities.
Things go awry when one of the property owners ends up dead. Lemoine coerces the secretive leaders of Birnam Wood to engage in a cover up. Until that climactic turn of events, the novel drags a bit. There is a great deal of exposition about the geography and politics of New Zealand, the charter and operations of the gardening collective and of the care and keeping of its plants, which, while informative, is not particularly gripping. Furthermore, the anti-market, libertarian, philosophical rants of the would-be journalist render him unlikeable at best—perhaps to cast him as a decoy and cover his role as an “only partly right” whistle-blower and truth-teller that emerges much later in the novel.
Choose this book and hang in there for the first half if you like a slow-burn thriller and are intrigued by either or both eco-justice or deep state, dark web technologies. At 423 pages, Birnam Wood requires patience and commitment. Its passages can be dense and loaded with lofty language. It is a sophisticated read, which is not unexpected for the Booker-Prize winning (The Luminaries) Catton.
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