BIRNAM WOOD (2023)
By Eleanor Catton
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 432 pages.
★★★★★
New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton has become one of my favorite authors. I adored The Luminaries (2013), for which she won the Booker Prize when was just 28. Catton took her time writing Birnam Wood and patience paid off; many critics have touted it as the best book of 2023.
Shakespeare fans will recognize Birnam Wood as a hubris device from Macbeth. In Catton’s novel it’s the name of a group of eco warriors who, in their own minds at least, fancy themselves anarchists whose tactics parallel those of 17th century English Diggers. That is, they are not violent; they appropriate unused lands, cultivate the soil, and raise food for themselves and others. The New York Times called Birnam Wood a “generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur.” That’s catchy, but simplistic.
Birnam Wood is smart, loaded with hubris, and is, at turns, horrifying and amusing. Much of the humor is directed at the 20-somethings in the Birnam Wood collective. Their naiveté is on full display, not the least of which resides in founder Mira Bunting. She is resilient, but a wide-eyed romantic who imagines that a network of vegetable-planters will shake both middle-class complacency and the foundations of capitalism. Even her closest Birnam Wood friend, Shelley Noakes, who attends to organizational nuts-and-bolts that the charismatic Mira overlooks, feels herself aging out of the group and is about to bolt like wild spearmint. Shelley sees Mira as a hippie wannabe and she’s not wrong.
Mira definitely has a bee in her bonnet when she learns that Owen Darvish owns thousands of acres on New Zealand’s South Island and is passing himself off as a philanthropic steward of the land. When a landslide kills five people in the Korowai Pass near his estate, she’s off in her van to engage in veggie trespassing. (The pass is real; the nearby town of “Thorndike” is fictional but analogous to several farming towns west of Christchurch.) Imagine her surprise when the Darvishes are off enjoying their knighthoods and Robert Lemoine, an American, is in residence. What’s a late-middle-aged high tech billionaire doing in New Zealand? Especially the owner of Autonomo, a drone manufacturer? It takes Robert a nano second to expose Mira’s pseudonym attempts, yet he claims to admire her spirit. Unbeknown to Mira, he despises the pretentious Darvishes and plans to buy them out. (Catton’s intent is to lampoon status-conscious title chasers.) Is Robert on the level about wanting such a remote property to decompress?
Back at Birnam Wood, Tony Gallo has returned from Mexico after several years abroad. He’s a hunk who once slept with Mira and still fancies her, but he’s also a rogue, so maybe Shelley or Rosie Demarney would do in a pinch. Tony is highly intelligent but, in different ways, is as intractable and quixotic as Mira. For example, he views himself a crusading journalist based on a few blog posts and essays in unread places. Unlike others, though, he has considered revolutionary ideals (semi-) grounded in theory. But when he calls out Birnam’s dreamy idealism with mansplaining aggravation, it serves mainly to contribute to old saw that the Left eats its young. Imagine Birnam Wood debates when Mira shows up with Lemoine’s offer of $100,000 of literal seed money for a Birnam Wood demonstration project at Thorndike. Is this real, or Mira’s Devil at the crossroads temptation?
Tony decides to investigate. So should you! You will pick up hints about Lemoine’s motives, but the novel shifts to one about circumstances and choices. Several crisis points force hands, but Birnam Wood cuts like a surgical knife when dissecting questions of idealism versus realism and the myriad dangers in trying to thread the needle between them. “Bonding” scenes between Robert and Birnam Wood are both droll and cringeworthy.
Mira has been compared to Jane Austen’s Emma, which is apt if you can picture Emma Woodhouse in Wellington boots, covered in mud, and sporting a foul mouth. Mira certainly yields no ground as a meddler. There’s an old labor song titled “Which Side Are You On?” To revisit the Times comment assumed anti-baby boomer frame, the brilliance of Catton’s careful plotting and penetrating prose forces us to answer the song’s question, “Exactly.” To the degree Catton tips her hand, it’s in her suggestion that to whom we turn to save the world has potentially apocalyptic consequences.
Rob Weir
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