Eleanor Catton
Set in New Zealand, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton is a political thriller with an elaborate plot. It opens with what appears to be a natural catastrophe—a landslide in which five people die. The Darvishes, owners of a large farm near the accident site, agree to sell the farm to Robert Lemoine, a billionaire and co-founder of Autonomo, a drone manufacturing company. Robert claims he wants to build an underground bunker in preparation for the impending apocalypse. His real intention, however, is more sinister: to illegally extract rare earth minerals from the nearby Korowai national park. His mining activities actually caused the landslide.
The farm has also attracted the attention of Mira Bunting, the founder of Birnam Wood, an activist collective that illegally grows vegetables on vacant public and private lands as a means to promote social change. Mira meets Robert Lemoine at the farm who offers her a hundred thousand dollars to fund her project. She convinces the Birnam Wood co-op to establish itself on the farm and cultivate produce. The lone dissenting voice comes from Mira’s former boyfriend and aspiring journalist, Tony Gallo. He argues it is a betrayal of their core principles to work with a capitalist billionaire who makes surveillance equipment for the military. He is outvoted, and the Birnam Wood crew head out to the farm to establish themselves. Sensing a scoop that will bring him fame as a journalist, Tony secretly follows them and gathers information exposing Lemoine’s clandestine activities in the park. He is spotted by security guards who chase him.
Meanwhile, Lemoine plays the congenial host to the gullible left-wing radicals on the farm. He is at once charming, duplicitous, manipulative, and calculating. He has surveillance drones and spy cameras at his fingertips, hacks phones, infiltrates emails and computers with the blink of an eye, and hires security guards with military training to keep trespassers away from his clandestine activities. He projects different personas and assumes different identities depending on his audience.
The plot twists and turns with the last section moving at a breathtaking pace. The situation rapidly deteriorates when Owen Darvish makes an unannounced visit to the farm. An accidental death leads to a chain of events that culminate in a bloody crescendo. The early sections, however, lean heavily toward exposition in lengthy sentences of unnecessarily extensive background information on even the minor characters. These feel like fillers, as do the debates about identity and privilege. The characters are portrayed in stereotypical fashion—the ruthless, all-powerful, arrogant billionaire; the young, idealistic, naive environmentalists cultivating vegetables while oblivious to the environmental devastation happening in the vicinity.
Catton positions her characters at major and minor intersections where they have to make a choice. Regardless of how noble or ignoble their intention, once they have made the choice, the consequences spiral out of control, rendering as meaningless all their strutting and fretting, all their dreams and aspirations. Just as Macbeth’s intention to be king is vanquished when the seemingly impossible happens with “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him,” Robert Lemoine’s ruthless ambition to multiply his billions many times over is similarly vanquished as a result of the seemingly innocuous activities of Birnam Wood.