Julie's Reviews > Birnam Wood

There is an Austen-esque quality to the first half of Birnam Wood that endeared me to the novel, a chatty interiority that delves deep into the characters' thoughts and motivations, that lingers in their pontifications. Pages pass with scarcely a paragraph break, thick hunks of prose like a monster club sandwich you can't get your mouth around without it falling apart.

It also meant I could read this only a few pages at a time before my attention began to wander, waiting and wondering where the promised "thriller" bits of this purported thriller would surface. When they do, it's a rush to a finish that is too replete with coincidence and cinematic flair to maintain the resonance of the novel's earlier thematic seriousness.

And yet. There is something deliciously satisfying about this odd social satire, a mannered consideration of young white leftists mired in their sanctimony and social justice jargon married to a bustling Le Carré thriller with a billionaire villain who can alter text messages on other people's phones and cause earthquakes with his greed. Eleanor Catton spares no one as she offers several characters their full turn on her stage, shifting points of view from chapter to chapter to give us the full 360° of this drama.

The premise is relatively simple: Birnam Wood is a gardening collective in Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island that reclaims unused land, without permission, to grow vegetables. It's meant to have a "horizontal" governing structure, but its leader is clear: one Mira Bunting, a charismatic, self-absorbed but dedicated young woman who knows how to charm or intimidate to get her way. Her foil is best friend Shelley Noakes, a self-deprecating but highly efficient worker bee who is mulling over the prospect of walking away from an endeavor she's patiently devoted years of her life to. Mira learns of a large farm several hours’ drive south that's been abandoned by its owners after a massive landslide has cut it and the neighboring town off from the rest of the region. She figures she can install a growing operation there before anyone is the wiser. What she doesn't count on is an American billionaire who also has his eye on the property to set up his apocalyptic bolthole. But he takes a shine to Mira and decides he'll underwrite Birnam Wood, presenting the guerrilla gardeners with a keen dilemma: the enemy, an American capitalist who made his fortune from surveillance technology, is giving this struggling little collective the opportunity to go legit and become a sustainable non-profit.

That's all you'll get for the plot from me. Catton goes on to turn this into a stylized thriller that is both laugh-out-loud silly and heartbreakingly tragic. Damn masterful, really. It's a swervy, deliberately inconsistent novel made up of parts that tumble together until they click into place with maddening inevitability, like her Booker Prize winning The Luminaries, which I adored to the stars and back. Birnam Wood captured less of my imagination than it did my admiration because its parts don't snap together quite as firmly into a cogent whole, but it is still a wow of a read.