A ‘thrilling’ review of Eleanor Catton’s (2023) Birnam Wood
Having reviewed Catton’s Booker Prize winning The Luminaries with mixed feelings, one was wondering what her follow-up effort would be like. The promotional endorsements on the black-and-white book jacket call it a ‘thriller’. I couldn’t agree more. In one line it’s even called a ‘literary thriller’. That I find debatable. In fact, I think the term ‘literary thriller’ is an oxymoron, for the following reasons: ‘Thrillers’ are almost by definition simple plots driven by unrelentless action, climaxing in the inevitable cliché of the high noon shootout. There is nothing ‘literary’ about it. To be unkind to the genre, one might offer a bit of a Freudian analysis: climactic killing action is a pathological sublimation of the genuine article - Catton’s depiction of sex in her ‘thriller’ is anything but thrilling, as we will detail later on. Given that her main protagonist, Tony, is a somewhat confused Kiwi Marxist, she might have let him note that vulture capitalism – as portrayed via the somewhat evil American Lemoine – can also be viewed as a sublimation of sorts. The next defining aspect of a thriller might follow the adage (attributed to Noam Chomsky) that nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely, i.e. the story line is unbelievable but not impossible, culminating in the ‘thrill’ of the chase, as it were. In other words, the thrill is in its unbelievability. So, in my book, good literature is totally believable, often because the author writes from personal experience, inventing protagonists who are often autobiographical and/or characters they know well in real life. Take James Joyce, Doris Lessing or Ernest Hemingway as examples of authors who develop characters that resemble themselves in an environment that they know very well. An exception is the historical novel – obviously – but which has the potential of great literature if the research for the novel is based on real characters and real events. Catton did well with her historical Luminaries in as much she brings to life aspects of Victorian Hokitika and the associated goldrush of this era. One clever trick was to have a newspaper man as a character as she could use archival newspaper clippings from the time in question. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort, contemporary or historical, can be said for Birnam Wood.
Why would a mild-mannered group of suburban gardeners, named after Birnam Wood, who plant crops on ‘unused’ land, be it private or public – elevated to some sort of eco-warriors by Batton – suddenly drive five hours to a disused farm, one of the co-founders, Mira, has read about in the news, and plant crops there? Only to meet the US billionaire who has concocted to buy the farm from a naïve Kiwi business couple, to hide his preposterous enterprise to secretly mine rare earth minerals from the neighbouring conservation park? Why would Tony, the former Birnam Wood member and short-time lover of Mira come back after five years from his failed socialist adventures in South America and figure out that there is a rat in this story, and indeed discover the secret mining operation only to be pursued by the evil Lemoine who poisons and kills everybody of the Birnam Wood crowd but with Tony, already half dead, escaping? Why is the naïve Kiwi business couple who are involved as a front for Lemoine suddenly suspicious to the degree that first he and then she gets killed as well? Why is the evil vulture capitalist Lemoine clever enough to seduce Mira’s sidekick Shelley who in any other way is portrayed as the timid bureaucrat of the group? The consensual sex described is nice as the evil Lemoine ‘had been a surprisingly attentive lover’. Well, a touch of Epstein would have added a touch of realism here, but as I said, nothing is impossible, but all of this is highly unlikely. Fast-forwarding Catton’s thriller, with the four or five main characters, could be done in a few pages, without missing a beat. To fill the pages (some 420 of it) she has to develop the already unbelievable characters by giving them cliched backgrounds, like Lemoine the self-made billionaire who escaped a dysfunctional upbringing, and on top of that, let them all have pages of internal monologue to presumably explain their twisted logic and thought processes, for none of them are normal in the sense of not requiring psychoanalysis or at least CBT in real life. Dysfunctional fathers, weird mothers, hostile siblings, being offensive, narcissistic (Tony, the Marxist, just wants to be famous, haha), sycophantic (the Kiwi business man) and what have you, are meant to define the characters. Whilst it may be realistic to draw characters as complex entities that are neither 100% good nor bad, it is a false premise that a mass-murderous character like Lemoine could have any redeeming qualities, such as Catton provides for Lemoine. First there are his amazing digital tech skills, outsmarting just about every known device known to mankind; to impress the average tech reader with items like an IMSI-catcher, one must merely peruse a few geek magazines and/or consult Google, and voila, Wikipedia delivers the goods in detail. Lemoine is an ‘excellent’ pilot making his fortune with manufacturing drones (how up-to-date is this), he is a teetotaller but does LSD micro-dosing, he is miles ahead of the Kiwi business couple who are portrayed as dumb but lovely (she shoots Lemoine in the end), he treats his subordinates with contempt, in short he is everything a billionaire these days should be in a twisted imagination, ruthless, clever, the American dream come true. I doubt Catton has ever met any billionaires of this calibre, so she must make it up from what one can read on social media that is forever fascinated by what lots and lots of money can buy. Maybe the subtext is centred on the aristocracy of money, i.e., if you didn’t inherit your wealth, and made it instead by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and escape your low class, you are bound to fail in the end, like the proverbial Epsteins who abuse their money as part of a low class throw-back to deviant behaviour. Moneyed aristocrats like Andrew may take part in such debauchery but are excused in the end because high class persons are essentially good people. Escape from your caste is prohibited. Maybe Catton should read Wilkerson and McGhee as a belated research project for her reconsidered characterization of Lemoine:
The Pulitzer-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson is right: behind the illusion of meritocracy, the US runs on a system of caste which she defines as “an artificial, arbitrary graded ranking of human value, the underlying infrastructure of a society’s divisions”.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/oct/08/us-student-debt-class-poverty-wealth
Contrast this with Tony’s shrill pronouncements on billionaires as blood suckers of the worst sort, undeserving of life, calling out “you’re going down, you piece of shit … you’re going to rot in hell. You’re fucking done, you motherfucker” (p.399). Not exactly what a cool and collected Marxist, even when in great pain, would say. Tony sounds more like deranged terrorist. When, on other occasions Tony holds forth with his Marxist pronouncements it sounds again as if lifted from Wikipedia, echoing a somewhat doubtful rhetoric on this topic, namely that Marxism, if not dead already, is a somewhat dangerous theory that amounts to totalitarian regimes in China and North Korea. Better keep up with the American Free Market idea even if some of the billionaires turn out to be mad. Or is it just a good spectacle to let a mad Marxist fight a mad capitalist? Since I bet that Catton knows neither Marxist nor vulture capitalist from personal experience, she must manufacture their characters as a fantasy construct in her image of the world, which in this instance seems rather warped. What about the gardening club, the Birnam Wood characters (somewhat loftily lifted from Shakespeare, and of course all being university graduates)? Having become bit of a gardener myself, I don’t really see a genuine description of what a dedicated gardener is. Catton portrays the group around Mira and Shelly primarily as thrill seekers in terms of planting crops on land not owned by them. It is not about a genuine commitment to liberate food production and feed the poor. The semi-technicalities of planting and looking after crops in a sustainable way again seem copied from ever growing (excuse the pun) gardening websites that promote zero-carbon footprints. Bizarrely, some such gardeners are running around with apps in their hands following instructions on how to prune, plant, irrigate, control pests, harvest, make preserves, fertilize, compost, recycle, make food forests, raid supermarket waste bins, extract underground heat, install solar panels, and wind turbines, in short: save the planet by app. As such the members of Birnam Wood, Mira and Shelly especially, hang on their iPhone day and night (it is 2017), messaging with emojis and all the abbreviations we have come used to as the mindlessly twittering social media in-crowd.
What is good about this thriller is its natural environment: here Catton knows what she is talking about but also being able to cut back to her Luminaries which is based in similar west-coast countryside. Her feel for the New Zealand bush is spot on, and we can just see Tony struggling through the undergrowth of ferns and tall grasses. Indeed, this New Zealand landscape is what makes New Zealand unique, her unspoilt conservation zones and national parks. That such nature is under threat is a good point made by Catton, except that the threat here is of unbelievable proportions. Actual mining concessions and gas and oil exploration are going full steam ahead with brakes only applied when useful as a green deal to show the world what we can do, and to appease domestic doomsday climate scientists.
Here Catton could have engaged in some real politics – Realpolitik – describing the shady deals between the Green Party and Labour versus the right-wing parties (now in power) that are hell-bent on extracting fossil fuels, minerals and gold from the land and sea, not to speak of intensive farming and pesticidal horticulture, to keep the capitalist economy on a roll. When writing this, the elections were a week away and Labour struggling in the polls, what with the corporate media salivating over the far-right, presenting live animal export lobbyists who want to have the ban on life animal exports lifted, with the argument worthy of a Lemoine, namely if we don’t do it someone else will, and we lose out on the profits to be made. So, what was that all about, a rusty old ship loaded with some 6,000 live NZ cattle bound for China sinking along the way? Sorry, mate, accidents happen. The green economy is a joke, they say. NZ’s methane emissions from intensive life-stock farming are way beyond acceptable limits, so there are always promises that by 2050 or so it will be reduced by 5% or so. This would be real Tony-speak! That Tony thinks the Lemoine mining operation is in cahoots with the NZ Government is of course another vast exaggeration put in his mouth. We know this would never happen, so there, you crazy Marxist Greenie! That Lemoine has the CIA in his DNA (via both of his wayward parents), commanding a military unit that extracts the rare earth minerals and causes a landslide, borders on slapstick dark humour. In what perhaps amounts to real NZ literature, we have Smith’s Dream (1971) by CK Stead, where US Marines put down a NZ left-wing revolution – it’s a dream but sounds quite realistic even today. Tony wouldn’t stand a chance when the fascist NZ Government calls in the US Marines! Catton also allows Lemoine to voice the current bogeyman, China, as a respectable excuse to engage in a bit of criminal behaviour if only it helps to defeat China. It is one thing to put words into the mouth of others to make them appear as uninformed populists but is quite another thing to then let them massacre a group of gardeners. It’s like saying that Hitler wasn’t all bad since he built the Autobahn.
So, what is the final verdict? Good thriller if you like a massacre for a climax. The book is suspiciously written like a film script, and I bet that Catton will receive respectable bids for the rights. Since the TV version of her Luminaries wasn’t exactly a great hit – to stage historical drama requires expensive sets, so the solution was to film the outdoor scenes in dim lights so as hide the fact that the street scene set was used again and again. Birnam Wood as a contemporary thriller has no such obstacles: the likes of Taika Waititi would make a good fist of it, given that he is a master of taking the mickey out of pretentious scripts. Indeed, Waititi might turn it into a great satire as he did in parts of his Jojo Rabbit movie, featuring Hitler as a madman. Or maybe Sir Peter Jackson might be a more amenable director as he takes his humour very seriously, like his early work on the zombie movie Braindead. Catton on the other hand might have difficulties with Jackson’s knighthood that made him SIR Peter, since her bumbling Kiwi entrepreneur SIR Owen in Birnam Wood is ridiculed as a poster man for conservation, when everyone knows that he hasn’t the slightest interest in such matters. Saving endangered birds is not his forte but is clever enough to use it as a public relations stunt in cahoots with Lemoine. After all, as a nice rejoinder, when in the end LADY Owen gets down to the farm and sees that a plastic drum with 1080 and other poisonous chemicals is missing – taken, as we soon find out, by Lemoine to feed it to the gardeners for breakfast – we come to understand that SIR Owen (now also dead) was in fact, as an owner of a pest control company, a purveyor of 1080 – an infamous animal poison. SAFE, a NZ animals rights organisation headlined an article in 2019 as below:
1080 poisoning an animal welfare catastrophe for New Zealand
Sir Owen as an avid hunter had taught his wife on how to use a gun, which was useful in shooting Lemoine in the head. It’s hard to imagine a more bizarre story, but then again, that’s the appeal of a good thriller, as a book or as a movie.
https://safe.org.nz/blog-articles/1080-poisoning-an-animal-welfare-catastrophe-for-new-zealand/
