Review: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
"and birnam wood is congress on its way to dunsinane" - lin manuel miranda
I read Eleanor Catton’s second novel The Luminaries in summer 2019 and really loved it. As a young employee I was kept in the lunchroom thirty minutes past the designated end of my lunch break turning through the final chapters of the book as the narrative reveals its starry conclusion.
The Luminaries is a very MFA novel, and Catton is an Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate so that totally tracks. Set in 1866 New Zealand at a time when those islands were British territory, Catton writes about her homeland with language that imitates Victorian literature of the time period. The story unfolds around a real historical gold rush that brings various characters to the South Island of New Zealand in a murder mystery plot that introduces a series of characters. The series of characters are the formal marvel of the book. Twelve characters represent astrological signs, seven other characters represent the seven celestial bodies visible from Earth with the naked eye, and characters interact with the real 1866 New Zealand night sky as planets spin. Additionally, chapters of the book each correspond to a month of the year, and they decrease in length by one third with each subsequent month, down to the exact word count, and the explained narrative melts away like the phases of the waning moon.
The astrology puzzle and Victorian tone got The Luminaries criticized as a “ship-in-a-bottle” writing, where Catton is more focused on formal challenge than thematic goals. But personally, I felt a deeper connection to the stars after reading the book, a sense of the motion of the celestial firmament, as well as connection to the place of New Zealand. I think there were real thematic goals achieved by the ornate structure of the book.
The Luminaries is very long, 263,000 words. Though it had an accessible central murder mystery narrative, its Victorian tone, immense length, and puzzlebox feel made it less accessible to average readers. But, for the same reasons that I loved it, The Luminaries won the Man Booker prize, making Catton its youngest recipient ever at age 28.
After that win, her career has taken an interesting path. She appears to have spent significant time adapting The Luminaries into a BBC series, which I have not seen. From reading summaries, the adaptation appears to be very different from the book, focalized around a female character who drives the mystery but does not often appear in the literal narrative of the novel. Catton also wrote the screenplay for Emma (2020), the most recent adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. I love that movie for its beautiful tumblrmaxed setting but never thought about the screenplay until I learned she wrote it. The screenplay’s voice is quiet, letting the words of Austen speak for themselves, but Catton’s work to showlessly bring forth the voice of Austen into a 21st century adaptation is admirable.
Last week, ten years after The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton released her followup novel, Birnam Wood. It’s half the length of The Luminaries and set in the present. Birnam Wood is a prophetic phrase pulled from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.”
The Birnam Wood prophecy is an impossibility to ambitious Macbeth, because trees cannot move, but when Macduff finally assaults Macbeth his troops camouflage in the from Birnam Wood, thus fulfilling the prophecy he believed impossible and ending his reign.
In the world of Catton’s Birnam Wood, Shakespeare’s words are repurposed as the name of a leftist gardening collective. This group plants organic gardens in unused space in lawns volunteered by sympathetic New Zealanders, and sometimes they less-than-legally trespass on abandoned lots and other unused space for additional agricultural land. The gardening collective is drawn to a rural area of New Zealand five hours away, where a landslide in a nearby national park has totally cut off a road. A particular patch of land, owned by an older New Zealand couple as a vacation home, potentially poses a perfect place to farm for the years it could take to clear the rubble. The group has been struggling and this is possibly the big break they need.
While scouting this land, one of Birnam Wood’s members meets American billionaire Robert Lemoine. Robert made a fortune on drone technology, but wants more. Inside the national park are rare earth metals used for cell phones and laptops which he is covertly harvesting in an attempt to make himself the richest man on earth. When he finds Birnam Wood trespassing on land that he intends to buy as cover for his illegal mining operation, he befriends them and offers money out of his immense fortune if they farm that land, hoping to use them as cover. Ideological and physical conflicts result, and I won’t explain further where the narrative goes because this is a spoilable novel in the classic sense.
This is a deftly crafted thriller, where each chapter ends with narrative propulsion that makes you want to keep reading. We switch between characters, many of which are Birnam Wood members, all of whom are slightly mistaken about the true nature of what’s unfolding, in the classic Austenian mistaken social expectations dynamic. Catton makes smartphone communication feel real and human, a difficult thing to do in writing, and they play a part in these mistaken expectations. The end of this book gave me the pageturning urgency I felt at the end of The Luminaries, and the final few pages are an incredible resolution to the story.
While narratively engaged at the end of the book, I was disappointed too, in that I was genuinely excited by the thematic ideas the book opened with, and wanted more thematic resolution to them. I love the idea of a gardening collective that farms unused land, especially juxtaposed with the smartphones and satellites that are fundamental parts of the book. Land takes on an interesting meaning when people spend more time inside. Because this is such a tight thriller narrative we don’t get too much of Birnam Wood quietly gardening in empty lots. There is enough substance here that this easily could have been an Infinite Jest-sized book, with more characters and more side stories while still holding this same central narrative. But Catton clearly wanted accessibility.
Accessibility is a confusing question when it comes to books like this. I’m not sure I believe in “literary fiction” as a genre, but that’s clearly what Catton writes. This is more difficult than Stephen King, and more substantive. But deep exploration of the substantive ideas Catton builds up are sacrificed for narrative propulsion. When I read books in the “literary fiction” genre I feel like they’re written for former English majors who can’t read at the level they did in college but still like the feeling of themes hitting their brain as they read a little after work. If I’m reading it, it's for me.
Some parts of Birnam Wood felt very well suited for book club. The leftist collective often debates privilege, the best ways to take impactful action, the importance of ideological purity, climate apocalypse, the presence of defensive irony in leftist culture. There isn’t any clear resolution, because these are cultural questions, but the questions are asked in interesting and empathetic ways that I think could prompt critical discussion. Catton is not reactionary or sycophantic when it comes to her portrayal on leftist organizing.
Not quite as empathetically done is Robert Lemoine’s billionaire character, the Macbeth of the narrative. The narrative doesn’t side with Lemoine’s ambition, which is fine, but makes it more a repurposing of the Macbeth story than a deeper exploration of it. Lemoine is written in a compelling way and his conversations with the Birnam Wood collective are always interesting. But at times he feels both comically powerful and comically shortsighted. Catton is trying to speak about the power billionaires wield, and Lemoine certainly has a lot of power. He can hack into character’s phones to edit messages they send to each other, and can track anyone with his fleet of drones. Yet he also operates alone, without confidantes, and he makes mistakes like the other characters do. Obviously, this is fiction, and it doesn’t have to perfectly model reality. But the specific way Lemoine is executed makes the book feel similar to the growing genre of capital critique fiction for general audiences, like Parasite and Knives Out and Triangle of Sadness and The Menu and White Lotus. I think that Birnam Wood is better than all of these, but the genre is a little tiring now.
One character in the Birnam Wood collective talks about how she hides behind effusive praise when she doesn’t know what to say. In many ways I don’t know what to say about Birnam Wood, so I’ve tried to be both critical and praise effusively. Catton writes with unmatched narrative urgency and has many truly creative ideas in this book, but I also feel like there’s something missing. Art is exciting when it follows down raw threads to uncharted corners. I felt that in The Luminaries in its insane astrological structure and slow reveal of true love behind it all. Birnam Wood I think possessed that same core, but it didn’t quite give itself the space to shine. I love how Catton cares about her home island of New Zealand, I love how she cares about nature and the stars. There’s so much to admire in her writing, so much genuine artistic creativity paired with a special worldview. Birnam Wood is a great and rehearsed act of plotting, a well-done spinoff novel in the A24 capitalist critique cinematic universe. It’s a good book and I recommend you read it if you want a pleasant and pushing plot that will keep you engaged after work. I still want Catton to write something unrestrained and brave in her next novel.
I’ve been really enjoying your essays. Keep it up!