Birnam Wood are a collective of idealists. They roam around the New Zealand city in which they are based and grow vegetables on unused plots of lands, occasionally with permission of their owners. People volunteer bits of time and effort, driving around the city looking for mulch or abandoned pieces of plastic tarp to cover the plants, weeding the lots and collecting rainwater. Everything is recycled. Important events are democratically decided during a meeting known as a hui, in deference to the Maori, but ostensibly the group is led by its founder, Mira Bunting. The group’s main goal is to one day be able to live off what they produce; breaking even, they call it. When Mira hears about an empty plot of land in the countryside, she heads up, illicitly stalking the place to see if the collective can break even. But American billionaire Robert Lemoine has his eyes on the same property, and on a whim, he offers to finance the group. What are his ulterior motives? Can they peacefully co-exist?
No, of course they fucking can’t. That’s not much of a spoiler; this isn’t a Disney-goes-Woke kind of novel. What it is, though, is original, well-written, engaging, and honestly, bloody brilliant. Words fail me. Honestly, people, this might be my favourite book of the past few years put together.
I was a big fan of Catton’s previous outing, The Luminaries, which combined technically brilliant writing with an engrossing plot, but one of the criticisms lobbed at that book was that there was a discrepancy between the two; the plot was at the mercy of Catton’s structure, which centered around astrology. Personally I think that’s a bit nitpicky because while I get what is meant with that, the plot is still a cracking read and it never felt forced. But either way, Birnam Wood doesn’t have the same constraints. And where The Luminaries was more of a highfalutin’ shaggy dog story, Birnam Wood is a lot darker, a sociopolitical thriller about the environment and money, and never the twain shall meet.
The politics behind this book pose interesting questions about the intersection between leftwing politics and capitalism: can they ever co-exist? The novel suggests not. It doesn’t help that Lemoine is an absolute psychopath; he’s not particularly subtle, yet he never veers into cliché villain territory. From what I know, it’s not at all uncommon for intelligent psychopaths to run successful multinationals; it’s the dumb ones who end up in jail for killing people, and Lemoine isn’t dumb. He gets how people function, he can adapt and think on his feet. He’s charming, manipulative and domineering. Mostly, he invites the collective in out of curiosity, just to see what will happen. He gives them hundreds of thousands of dollars, a pittance to him but more money than the collective could ever have dreamed of. Immediately, it begins to rip the community apart: the one guy who tells them it’ll be a problem is booted out of their meeting, partly because they want to believe they can reach their goals but mostly because the guy, Tony, is one of those people we’ve all met at college, who love the sound of their own voice, who can afford their principles, and who are convinced they’re going to be the next big thing in journalism. If you’re expecting this to be a leftwing manifesto, look elsewhere; Catton doesn’t spare that side either. The collective are well-intentioned but naive and self-involved, and at times, focused on entirely the wrong things.
The novel is divided into three long chapters, and it never fails to be engaging, but it’s the third part where it really kicks into gear: it hooked me from the start, but towards the end it’s genuinely unputdownable. It’s also bleakly, darkly funny, from Tony’s righteousness to the cheerful bureaucracy of the Birnam Wood collective, to Lemoine’s curiously manipulating the collective. It’s gleefully glum, cheerfully fatalistic. The ending is amazing, explosive and fitting without losing sight of the less than optimistic message of the novel. Honestly, it’s going to be hard to find anything that’ll top this book this year.