Eleanor Catton’s Shakespearean Climate Tragedy
Image Description: Silhouettes of 3 people walk in a line on a hill in front of a forest made of tall, green, conical trees. Above the canopy, a surveillance drone in the sky monitors the oblivious human beings.
Birnam Wood, an eco-thriller published in 2023 by Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries) is difficult to write a review for. Not only is it hard to have an honest discussion without giving away major plot points, but telling someone about the novel’s best aspects feels like ruining their experience before it’s even begun. To those who have yet to read it, I’ll spare you from the minor spoilers below and just say: read the book.
Split neatly into three acts, we follow the eponymous gardening collective Birnam Wood, whose activism involves cultivating plots of unused land across their home country of New Zealand – often illegally. Most of the idealistic members are in their mid to late twenties, and three of them emerge quickly as key players in the story.
Co-founder Mira Bunting, a gifted horticulturist and perhaps an even more talented liar, is itching for the collective to have a bigger impact. Her best friend and roommate, Shelley Noakes, is the underappreciated organizational backbone of the group, but she’s having trouble figuring out a way to tell Mira she wants out of Birnam. Lastly, there’s the self-righteous co-founder Tony Gallo, back from his years of travelling abroad and eager to finally make some “real change.” Tony considers himself principled – others would probably just consider him annoying.
The book begins when an unprecedented landslide occurs in Korowai National Park, killing five and shutting down access to the neighboring tourist town. The tragedy leaves a vast farm property completely abandoned – which to Mira, means it’s up for the taking. Seeing the opportunity for Birnam Wood to harvest crops on their biggest scale yet, she visits the property. Everything looks perfect for the group to swoop in and begin their project, until she’s caught trespassing by American billionaire Robert Lemoine, the founder of Autonomo, a drone manufacturer.
It turns out that Lemoine’s the new owner of the property, and he’s using it to build his own doomsday bunker. Though Mira thinks she’s busted when she gets caught, Lemoine’s intrigued by her bravado. He surprises her by offering her and Birnam Wood funding to cultivate the farm. This single interaction between Mira and Lemoine, and Mira’s ensuing choice to accept his offer, sets into motion the gripping action that follows.
Throughout the novel, every main character is jostling for control over themselves, each other, and the eventual fate of Birnam Wood and Korowai National Park. The biggest currency of control for the cast is access to information, the ability to know everyone else’s hand and when they’ll play it so you beat them first. Intentionally set in the digital age, all Birnam Wood’s characters engage with a casual technological surveillance state – they’re checking each others’ locations, stalking each others’ public profiles, creating email addresses for made-up people to keep tabs on the property holdings of real people.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the billionaire Lemoine that has an almost god-like omnipresence over everyone else. Sure, most people in Lemoine’s tax bracket throw their weight around to have things their way, but Catton makes Lemoine’s unbalanced hold on power inextricably linked to the fact that the particular pile of gold he sits on comes from manufacturing surveillance drones. Enabled by money and his own resources, Lemoine goes above and beyond in his invasions of privacy. He reads private emails, uses camouflaged drones with thermal heat detectors to keep tabs on any over-eager passersby, and gives himself remote access to manipulate any communications on Mira’s cellphone just minutes after he meets her.
Birnam Wood plainly lays out the kind of person Lemoine is, which makes it even more maddening to watch Mira, and eventually Shelley, succumb to his charms against their better judgment. And still, Catton succeeds in making him seem only mildly threatening. Even when aware of all his snooping and the darker truth of his presence in Korowai, I found his pretense of endearment for the collective completely plausible. I understood why Mira and Shelley believed what they wanted to, and even wanted them to be right about him. It’s a successful warning about ignoring all the cautionary signs of privilege and power just because you were offered a seat at the table.
The only person rejecting that seat is Tony. He vehemently denounces the decision to work with a billionaire as unethical and leaves the group. Thinking it may be his chance to cement a career in journalism, or even a status as the “voice of a generation,” he secretly travels to Korowai on his own with hopes of writing an exposé on Lemoine.
As frustrating as it is to be privy to Tony’s impassioned rants, even more grating is realizing that underneath the deluded savior complex, he makes some valid points. Can an ostensibly-socialist gardening collective maintain its integrity if financially tied to a man who made his fortune off surveillance drones? It’s easy to understand his frustration that the climate-justice organization he co-founded is jumping in bed with a billion-dollar tech company whose CEO is building his very own apocalypse bunker right by a national park.
Still, Mira and Shelley have a sound argument. After years of maintaining spread-out scraps of gardens with little to no money, Lemoine’s funding would provide Birnam Wood their largest scale crop cultivation efforts by a long shot, large-scale publicity in their future, and a chance to bring the climate fight to the mainstream. If the potential to effect positive change for their cause is higher than it’s ever been, then maybe it doesn’t matter where the money’s from.
This inconclusive ideological debate is one of many in the novel, and it’s proof of Catton’s skill in handling the complications of her layered ensemble cast. The book’s primary way of getting information to the reader is through changing third-person perspective. We don’t stay with any one character for a long stretch at a time, but when we’re with them, we have front-row seats to every single machination turning their gears. The granular level of access to their frenzied internal monologues can be overwhelming – do people really live like this? But this is where the book shines, and where you find most of its prescient satire. With exacting, biting examination of each character’s thought processes, Catton lays bare each of the hypocrisies and false-truths they tell themselves. Just as much effort is put into making you relate to each character as it is to checking them on their bullshit. Everyone’s a little bit right about something, but a little bit wrong about something else.
The characters are most frequently proven wrong about each other. Catton’s otherwise distinct characters share two specific traits: 1) an almost pathological desire for complete control over the way they’re perceived, and 2) the conviction that they are the single person who can see everyone else’s motivations with clear, unclouded eyes. As we move through their heads, seeing them put on their best performances of self for each other, you see how many of these grasps for control and unfounded assumptions about each other change the course of the story and add to the depth of each character.
You hate Tony until he’s the only one making any sense. You feel protective over sensible, mild-mannered Shelley, until you realize that by believing what the other characters thought about her, you may have dangerously underestimated her grit. A character is made a rube, then a genius, and then made a fool all over again.
Instead of miscommunicating, Catton’s characters obfuscate. Every choice they make is an integral part of a tightly-wound butterfly effect leading us to a hectic climax that was hinted at all along. The novel is set up so that by the midpoint, readers know everybody’s secrets and ulterior motives. In short, there’s nothing left for us to “find out.” Instead of escalations and story twists coming from sudden reveals of information, they come from the fallout from characters’ motivated decisions made based on what they think they know.
For a book focused on the politics of a young generation beaten into complacency by institutions of late-stage capitalism, Catton makes a refreshing point about individual agency. There’s a feeling of dread for the young activists facing a kind of power most will only ever dream of. Yet, had they stopped to get their bearings before making most of their hasty choices, there was a path that could have led them out of their murky circumstances. But in order to do that, they would have to be able to see the forest for the trees.
