Lemoine said in a cool, clear voice ‘Do you have something you want to say?’
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (Granta Books, 2024), p. 269
He could only be addressing Shelley. There was another lull. Mira stood in the dark astonished, mouth open, waiting for Shelley’s reply.
‘I’m guess I’m just a little worried that we might be doing this for different reasons,’ Shelley said at last.
‘But that’s life, isn’t it? ‘ said Lemoine, speaking lightly. ‘Everybody always has their own reasons for doing what they do. You can’t police motivation.’
‘No, I know’, Shelley said quickly. ‘I know that.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Lemoine.
Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a psychological eco-thriller all about ambition and its capacity to corrupt even the most noble-minded. With environmental conservation as the backdrop, Catton’s novel is primarily concerned with the relationship between activism and the self. Mira Bunting is the leader of a fledgling guerrilla gardening group called Birnam Wood whose activities include illegally planting crops on unoccupied land around their city as well as in the yards of students. Birnam Wood is staunchly anti-capitalist so when Mira accepts one hundred thousand dollars from billionaire venture capitalist Robert Lemoine, who offers Birnam Wood full access of vacant farmland that he purports to be his for apparently nothing in return, with the hope that his funding will transform the group into a well-oiled machine, it doesn’t go down well with the other members. Lemoine himself has also struck a deal with the recently-knighted Owen Darvish, a self-made man who has sold his land to Lemoine in exchange for a business partnership with Lemoine’s tech company that will hopefully bolster his foray into environmental conservation.
The novel takes its title from the forest in Macbeth that, initially a sign to Macbeth of his own invincibility, ends up signifying his undoing when enemy soldiers move through it in such a way that it appears the forest itself is moving. This ‘movement’ of the forest undermines Macbeth’s gloat, based on a myopic view of the plausibilities and possibilities in his world, that his vanquishment ‘will never be’ for ‘Who can impress the forest, bid the tree | Unfix his earth-bound root?’ It is apt, then, that Catton begins Birnam Wood with an epigraph featuring this quote because like Lord and Lady Macbeth, the main characters of her novel all enter into some kind of business deal with each other, and, each believing themselves to be outsmarting the other, find themselves undone by their underestimation of their business partner-cum-opponent (hoisted by their own petard, if you will.) It’s very messy, very Shakespearean, and gives weight to Walter Scott’s ‘O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive’.
With the novel, Catton asks questions about the relationship between politics and identity, the nature of activism itself and whether or not any political endeavour can ever be without hypocrisy (she says no), and what constitutes righteousness and who decides, among others. Despite the fact that Lemoine is a caricature of the billionaire figure in the leftist imagination (the disregard for human life doesn’t get more on the nose than referring to five labourers who died from a landslide caused by your illegal mining activity as ‘just a few lives’ or thinking, as your business partner’s wife drunkenly overshares his personal matters to you, about how you’d kill your hypothetical wife if she ever spoke behind your back) Catton is careful not to imply that any one character’s politics are intrinsically better than another’s. In an interview for the podcast Little Atoms, Catton said she’d been describing Birnam Wood as “a novel where nobody thinks that they’re the bad guy”, and I think that’s definitely the novel she wrote.1
One of the things I really enjoyed about the novel was that she gave every one of her characters the same level of complexity and their values equal scope for scrutiny. Robert Lemoine is by far one of the most menacing presences I’ve read in a novel in a long time, not just for the way that he chooses to use his technological prowess, the source of his wealth, to violate even those on his side without remorse or because he may or may not have killed his real wife in what is written into history as a tragic aircraft accident. And yet, while Lemoine is chilling as an example of the notion of rugged individualism at its most extreme, equally terrifying, albeit in a very different way, is the relative ease with which Mira discards allegedly deep-seated convictions when it becomes advantageous to her to no longer hold them and the way she reasons herself out of believing herself to be a hypocrite. Through Mira’s antagonism towards white middle class men for their white middle-classness, both categories to which Mira herself belongs, Catton does not shy away from highlighting the cognitive dissonance that underpins Mira’s activism. When she represents Owen Darvish’s privileged identity (in Mira’s eyes) as the very reason for Mira’s irritation that he is receiving recognition for his efforts in conservation, Catton draws attention to this dissonance in Mira and to the thinness of the idea that the basis of her own concern for environmental conservation is anything other than self-glorification.
I love when I read a book and it’s evident from the very first introduction of a character that the author has spent a lot of time observing humans, undoubtedly more than they have ever spent writing about them, and I immediately got this sense from Birnam Wood. The novel certainly earns the descriptor ‘character-driven’ because easily the most impressive thing about it is Catton’s characterisation of her main players, which I thought was incredible. Despite them all being a Macbeth in some way, all of Birnam Wood’s characters are still very individual and discomfitingly realistic. Catton writes with such a perceptiveness to human psychology and emotions that at many points, particularly those detailing the hidden motives behind a certain choice, reading her characters’ thoughts felt like a violation of my own mind. Shelley’s people-pleasing is immediately recognisable to anybody who’s ever been a people pleaser, as is the insecurity behind Mira’s unbothered, wise-beyond-her-years persona and behind Tony’s desperate need to prove himself to everyone around him through his journalism.
One of the things I found really interesting about the book was the relationship between Sir Owen Darvish and his wife Lady Darvish, who, as the novel’s only functioning and unabashedly social-climbing couple, most immediately resemble Lord and Lady Macbeth. While Lady Darvish makes no attempt to hide her social aspirations, not being shy in voicing her disappointment at one airline website’s lack of a ‘Lady’ option on its drop-down menu following her husband’s knighthood, and clearly possesses delusions of grandeur (‘sometimes she saw her marriage as a kind of service to the public good’) Catton does not conclusively cast her as Lady Macbeth in her marriage or in the novel’s wider cast. I found Lady Darvish such a compelling character because while she is the archetypal middle aged, long-married wife who knows her husband better than he knows himself and overbearingly takes it upon herself to manage his social calendar and write his birthday cards for him because she believes, or wants to believe, that he is too inept to do these things himself, Catton makes clear that in actuality, Lady Darvish has little power over her husband and that this is a truth known intimately—but never voiced—by both Lord and Lady. Lady Darvish’s transformation into a virago at the novel’s climax, then, wherein we see her truly embody Lady Macbeth’s manliness for the first time, is rendered so surprising by this prior characterisation. In Lady Darvish, Catton offers a female character that isn’t quite a subversion of the scheming, ruthless wife trope, but also isn’t a complete negation of it either, which was really interesting to read.
The novel is a brilliantly written, fascinating look into the psychology of people who each have something to gain from other people and are willing to go to any lengths to get it. Catton knows how to construct characters you’re interested in and how to structure her story to maintain suspense and keep you gripped to the end, using perspective shifts cleverly. The socio-political commentary and the Shakespearean-ness of it all was just the cherry on top of an already gorgeous cake. In tone and themes, it’s very similar to Margaret Attwood’s Hag-Seed, which I also really enjoyed and is also a retelling of Shakespeare (Attwood’s is an adaptation of The Tempest, though, rather than Macbeth). If you enjoy social criticism and slow burners heavily involving intrigue, games of wit and betrayals of various kinds, you’ll really like Birnam Wood. 4.5/5.
A Moment For The Dress…*
*some of my favourite lines from the book
Mira was scowling. It annoyed her, almost as a matter of principle, that anyone of this man’s age, race, gender, wealth, should have used his power – allegedly – for good, should have built his business – allegedly – up from the ground, from nothing, and should possess – allegedly – the very kind of rural authenticity that she herself most envied and pursued… Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. But because this was not a conscious habit, she experienced only a vague feeling of righteous defiance as, unable to dismiss Owen Darvish, she told herself instead that she disliked him
p. 8
Mira would not be home for half an hour at least, but already Shelley’s heart was beating fast and the skin of her throat and breast had mottled. She stood up, breathing deeply, and tempted herself with the thought that perhaps today was not the day to broach the subject after all… but then she heard Mira’s voice in her head telling her that there was a voice in her head, and that the voice was her mother’s.
p. 11
She had sought out Mia’s friendship with a fervour that approached on infatuation, transforming herself, though she would not realise it until years later, into a more perfect image of the person that Mira told herself that she already was: more benighted, more repressed, and more continually in conflict with a mother whose every utterance, she came to discover, incarnated no less than the spectre of late capitalism itself.
p. 12
At university, he majored in political philosophy and gained a reputation for being adversarial in seminars, to the point that he was often asked, in the language of the day, to check his privilege – most often, it seemed to him, at the very moment that his opponents’ other, better arguments ran out. Politics, as the adage goes, is first experienced at home, and the autocratic Dr Gallo had ruled his household in a manner that was so oppressive and so patently unjust that Tony had grown used to thinking of himself in insurrectionary terms. All his life he had been overlooked, subjugated, ridiculed, and deprived of opportunities for self-defence, and he would not be persuaded, now, that his sole emancipation from Dr Gallo’s tyranny – his mind – was merely a symptom representing him as yet another tool of the oppressor class.
p. 31
She had grown up with a stout faith in the proven clarity of right and wrong, and had never doubted for a moment that to be treated as an adult was much better than to be treated as a child; but she had feared, in lonely moments, that for her parents she existed merely as a kind of party trick, a dazzling proof of how well she had been parented, a living testament not to her own powers of discernment, but to theirs.
p. 49
Few things were more tantalising to Mira than when she missed out on an interesting argument only to hear it summarised badly – or too briefly – after the fact. She hated having to rely on someone else’s version of events, for she was much too proud of her own powers of discernment ever to accept another person’s judgement over whose ideas had been valid, whose logic convincing, and whose rhetoric fair; still more infuriating was the thought that an interesting argument could have even taken place without her, for she was the most long accustomed to being thought the liveliest and most original thinker of any company in which she found herself, and she had met few people in her life whom she honestly admired and envied when it came to the art – the many arts – of conversation.
p. 182
There were few things Lemoine liked less than being humoured, so when he’d first arrived, he’d placed an order for a double-short cortado, not to drink – he hadn’t touched a cup of coffee since he’d started microdosing acid on a weekly basis – but just to see their faces fall when they realised that he must be planning on staying in the office till the early hours of the morning, if not through the night.
p. 228
…she was not unaware that there was a certain satisfaction to be found in hopelessness, a certain piety, a touch of martyrdom, in feeling oneself and one’s entire generation to have been wronged by those in power, and deceived, and discouraged from civic participation, and robbed, and made fun of, and maligned.
p. 251
- Eleanor Catton, “Little Atoms 816 – Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood”, Little Atoms, 2024 [accessed March 2024], 00:01:58-00:02:12. ↩︎
