Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
In March, Eleanor Catton visited Vancouver to converse with Bill Richardson about Birnam Wood. Lesley Hurtig, artistic director of the local Writer’s Fest, characterized the novel as “a stunning takedown of late capitalism,” while Bill Richardson found many parts of it laugh-out-loud funny. A consummate interviewer, he got the author talking about what inspired the work as well as what influenced her.
Catton expressed concern about the societal effects of the technologies we’ve grown so dependent on. They alter our thinking and social behaviour, and their ubiquity make us all complicit in degrading our planetary home. Describing the environmental situation as dire, she said, “The scale of reform needed to face our existential challenges is huge.”
In 2015, Catton was en route to the apartment she would occupy as a writer in residence at the University of Amsterdam. Progress was slow because the streets were being dug up. Asking her driver why so many repairs were being undertaken in the same area, she was surprised when he said the schedule was deliberate. When student protests to oppose sweeping changes to university governance had brought out masses of demonstrators, the city had responded by reducing the available places to march.
As she took up her post in Amsterdam, Catton reflected on a personal criticism levelled at her by New Zealand’s prime minister, whose policies she vehemently disagreed with. In 2009, Prime Minister John Key’s government had planned to open up the nation’s National Parks to mining; however, enormous public opposition forced them to draw back. In the same year, Key’s regime reinstated the use of titles in the New Zealand honours system, allowing him to acquire the title of Sir.
Key retaliated against Catton’s political criticism with a personal attack. Calling her a “fictional writer” (sic), he said she was ignorant of politics and therefore unqualified to comment. Flagrantly anti-democratic as his comment was, it undermined her confidence. It also led her to read a lot of political history and protest literature, which formed “a layer of compost” from which the novel grew.
Impossible to classify, the book reads by turns, as a parable, a thriller, and a satirical comedy of contemporary manners — or lack of them. A group of smug, confused, privileged cell-phone toting Millennial activists want to blame the capitalist mindset for the state of the planet. Yet as the smug members of the guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood feel while presenting themselves as politically correct, the reader is shown their deep flaws.
Through these characters, Catton reveals the gulf between how people see themselves and how they really are. The exaggerated forms of self-delusion practiced by Mira, Tony and Shelley make them funny, yet relatable. Robert is a classical example of a psychopath. Though his backstory can never excuse his behaviour, it serves as a sociological commentary, an indictment against the deplorable child-raising skills of his parents and the society that produced them.
Anyone who follows the news is frequently exposed to stories about real people who resemble Robert: wealthy, famous, powerful and entitled. Using his respectable business venture to distract attention from a secret and illegal scheme, Robert touts the virtues of drone technology, saying it has “the power to impact every sector of every economy of every country on the planet.” When as an afterthought he mentions other useful applications including law enforcement, wildlife management, peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, the irony is not lost on the reader. We know how he’s really using the drones.
Yet nasty as Robert is, he also possesses an aspect the reader finds hilarious. Thrilled by “the sense that he alone could understand himself,” he marvels deliciously at his own eccentric mind. His utter indifference to any form of conservation injects a dark humour into his acceptance of the fairy tern as a “substitute endangered species with which to launch the project.” More darkly funny is his reaction to Jill talking about her husband behind his back — “if he had ever caught his wife talking that way…he’d have killed her.” Indeed, the reader has more than once been encouraged to wonder whether he did exactly that.
A natural bully, Robert is pleased to see his employees duck behind their screens “in a pantomime of conscientious productivity” at the mere sight of him. With a light touch, Catton showcases the contemporary norm of self-absorbed consumption and image management that preoccupies the other characters almost as much as it does Robert. In his presence, the newly minted Sir Owen is “both fawning and strutting.”
We laugh at the efforts of the Birnam Wood crew to strike the right tone in each text message, and find it pathetic how desperately they await each reply so they can begin to obsess over whether they’ve created the desired impression. By revealing how they are acted upon by their mutual propaganda, Catton exposes the unsatisfying lies, posing and fakery that poison their exchanges.
The virtue-signalling gardeners of the Birnam Wood collective are particularly blind to their own faults and contradictions. Mira, we are told, “like all self-mytholgizing rebels…prefers enemies to rivals,” even going so far as to turn enemies into rivals, “the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo.” Yet her creator tells us Mira is also “a prisoner of her moral sense.”
Nor are older characters exempt from Catton’s sharpened pen. Thinking about her absent husband, recently knighted, Jill cleans, tones and moisturizes her face before dabbing “three tiny dots of serum under each eye.” In this way the author highlights the wife’s blind belief that she knows her husband better than he knows himself.
Speaking of the very real social dangers her story portrays, in the Richardson interview, Catton pointed to the prevalence of the algorithms that are coming to dominate our daily interactions. Like psychopaths, they systematically read our desires and adapt to them, then use them for their own purposes.
Catton sees our escalating dependence on algorithm-driven technologies as a moral crisis. By allowing such technologies to enslave and dehumanize us, we are swindled into believing in the economic gospel of the zero sum game, an outcome of the binary “thought” that operates computers. As we mistake algorithms for truth, our natural faculties of imagination, morality and emotion begin to atrophy.
As a species, we need love, care and attention. A healthy culture with a mature understanding of the arts has to resist zero-sum thinking. The media promote the false assumption that if A wins then B must lose. But real life is full of opportunities for mutual development, where both sides, or all sides, can cooperate to gain new skills and new understanding. We must take our courage in hand, open our minds, and discuss the rapidly accelerating problems of our time. The alternative, warns Catton, allowing terror to freeze us into a state of cynicism, can never save us.
Indeed, to believe we can foresee an inevitable dystopian end is to help bring it about. Instead, we must bind ourselves together together in hope. We can only begin to save ourselves when we believe salvation is possible. We each have a moral duty to act out this necessary optimism by doing whatever we can as well as we can. What we need, says Catton, is creativity, ingenuity, and love. She also observes that becoming a mother has oriented her more securely toward the future.
Catton speaks of transcendence as a fact of nature embedded in things unknowable to humans. “It is crucial for our well-being that we have a sense of transcendence, that things matter beyond their practical use,” she said, causing Richardson to comment that as he read Birnam Wood, his mind “kept drifting toward God.”
The author traces the reference to Macbeth in her title to a line of thought that began when she came upon the play at the age of twelve. Crediting Shakespeare with inventing the shock twist, she believes that the tragedy of Macbeth concerns the “incredible allure of certainty about the future.” In 2016, as she watched the old certainties falling away with Trump and Brexit, she re-read Macbeth and felt a certain sympathy with his desire to know for sure.
Tellingly, she points out, there is no fate in Macbeth — the entire plot depends on the flaw in his character. “The most tragic stories,” she says, “are those which could so easily have gone right.”
Her previous novel, The Luminaries, published in 2013 when she was only 28, won Eleanor Catton the Booker Prize and other honours. It was made into a television series in 2020.