Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“BIRNAM WOOD” by Eleanor Catton (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ38 paperback; $NZ50 hardback)

            For reasons too tiresome to recite, I’m behind the pack in reviewing Eleanor Catton’s third novel Birnam Wood. It was published in February this year, nearly ten years after the publication of Catton’s second novel, the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries. I was a great admirer of The Luminaries, scorned the negative reviews of it which two elderly New Zealand literary figures contributed to British newspapers, and wrote a very positive review of The Luminaries for Landfall (review can be read on this blog).  I admired Catton’s leaps of imagination, the way she introduced a plethora of vivid characters, her credible depiction of New Zealand’s West Coast as it once was, and her cunning in turning the conventions of nineteenth-century mystery novels upside-down. A mega-force of deconstruction across 800 pages. Okay, the television serial based on the novel, which Catton herself co-scripted, was a big let-down in a number of ways. But the lustre of the novel remained.

            I sincerely wish I could be as positive about Birnam Wood.

            Confession: I was so late in getting the novel that I had already read a number of reviews of Birnam Wood before it came into my hands. One or two reviewers had misgivings or reservations about it while the great majority, in both New Zealand and Britain, hailed it as another great novel, with some perhaps being awed by the fact that the author was a Booker Prize-winner. But one thing perturbed me. The most positive reviews seemed to be applauding the novel for the issues it raised, rather than for the quality and texture of the novel itself.

To orient you, Birnam Wood is set in New Zealand in 2017, the era of John Key, neoliberalism and in some cases the era of welcoming as residents very wealthy Americans who, it was (on the whole wrongly) thought, would somehow boost the economy.  Birnam Wood is the name of a sort of conservationist collective whose mission is to plant veges and flowers in unused land or in public land that is not being put to good use. In effect, they have a “moving garden”, planting things here and there, something like the “moving forest” in Bill Shakespeare’s play Macbeth - whence the novel’s title. The collective meets somewhere outside Christchurch. An American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, has bought land near the Southern Alps, adjacent to a large estate being sold by the New Zealand businessman Owen Darvish, who has recently been knighted. Robert Lemoine wants Owen Darvish’s land, but hasn’t yet closed the deal in buying it. Robert Lemoine openly tells some people that he is a survivalist, wants a bolt-hole in New Zealand to avoid Armageddon (an obsession for some Americans with more money than sense) and claims he is going to have an impregnable bunker built… but he also knows that he needs some favourable publicity.  So he latches on to a form of “green washing”, claiming to be interested in conservation. And this is where he buddies up with the Birnam Wood people. One of the collective, Mira Bunting, happens to meet Lemoine, is impressed by his conservationist talk, and persuades the collective to join her in making one of their “guerrilla” gardens on Lemoine’s property. … and in no time they are enjoying the billionaire’s largesse. But there is one former member of the Birnam Wood collective, a would-be journalist called Tony Gallo, who is very sceptical of this arrangement. We are soon made aware that Lemoine’s talk of survivalism is really a cover for something more sinister. Defying the law, he wants to covertly drill and mine in national parks for “rare-earth elements” that can go into the making of electronic devices and other Silicon Valley things.

So there’s the set-up. Evil hiss-the-villain ultra-capitalist exploitative American billionaire pitted against well-meaning but somewhat naïve conservationists…  and one heretic, Tony Gallo, who is determined to uncover the truth, in spite of all the drones that watch constantly over Lemoine’s territory and in spite of the goons that Lemoine can whistle up with their weapons and intimidating vehicles. I’m not the first to note that, stripped down to its essentials, this is a genre book, a thriller, modelled on the likes of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher yarns. After a long, slow burn there is ultimately murder and a bloodbath.

I have no doubt that Eleanor Catton undertook much research in writing Birnam Wood. She can name and describe scrupulously all the flora that engages the conservationists. She can tell us how drones work, how new communication systems can be abused, how phones can be blocked or infected with a virus – some of the tricks used by Mr Evil Lemoine when people get too nosey about his enterprise. In this good-versus-evil tale, Catton also has the finesse not to present the conservationists as angels. There are quarrels and old grudges within the Birnam Wood collective, especially between Mira and her sometime rival Shelley, and a suggestion that personality can trump idealism. Her depiction of the collective is nuanced. By contrast, the opposition (Robert Lemoine, Sir Owen Darvish and to a lesser extent Lady Darvish) are more taken for granted as destructive capitalists – flat characters with little nuance.

            So Birnam Wood touches on neo-liberalism, pirate capitalism, shady dealings among the wealthy, the environment, environmentalists, the nature of New Zealand culture, journalism and how honours (knighthoods) are doled out. All very weighty issues for sure, and liable to be regarded as a “state-of-the-nation” novel by those who judge novels for the issues raised. To paraphrase “It’s on the side of the angels, so it must be an important book”.

            At which point I dissent.

            First, even for a thriller with a bloody conclusion, there are too many improbable things driving the plot. Okay, thrillers often have gross improbabilities, but this novel aims for some form of gravitas and it thus sabotages itself. Would nearly all the members of the Birnam Wood collective really be so gullible as to fall for Lemoine’s charms after what they already know about him?  Would Tony Gallo, in one episode early in his investigation, be able to ring Sir Owen Darvish and so easily pump him for information that the businessman wants to withhold? I’m not a swine and I do not disclose endings, but I do not for one moment believe the last-minute intervention by an unlikely character in the grand, bloody finale. Of course this could be passed off as deliberate satire on thrillers, going over the top as a form of criticism, in the way that Catton up-ended Victorian mystery novels in The Luminaries. Let's all laugh at this parody of the sort of mass murder that features as the climax of so many action movies. But again, this detracts from credibility and undermines what was presumably Catton's serious intent for the whole novel.

            The blurb on the back cover quotes British author Francis Spufford saying “What I admired most in Birnam Wood was the way that the rapid violence of the climax rises, all of it, out of the deep, patient, infinitely nuanced character-work that comes before. If George Eliot had written a thriller, it might have been a bit like this.” Really? I admire Spufford’s own work (see on this blog reviews of his Red Plenty and Golden Hill ) but, as well as the fatuous statement about George Eliot, Spufford is dead wrong about the characterisation. In the opening 100 or so pages of this 420-page book, the “character-work” is presented to us in laborious form introducing character by character before the wheels of the story start turning. Some authors can almost get away with this if they have the skill (consider Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo , where much of the novel chronicles who characters are before a real plot kicks in). But this novel doesn’t have such skill. I may be seen as contradicting myself – after all, one thing I enjoyed in The Luminaries was the plethora of colourful characters. But the point is that, in the earlier novel, the characters were genuinely colourful and distinctive. The characters in Birnam Wood are not and some of them are given to windy ideological orations. In the Birnam Wood’s meetings we face a long tirade by Tony Gallo which sounds like a muddled sophomoric wind-up. So too in later passages.

In general, Catton’s prose is clear and readable. Many readers will enjoy it. Even so, Birnam Wood can best be described as a thriller with pretensions

Footnote: Quite divorced from that I’ve been discussing, there is one quotable thought in Birnam Wood articulated by Shelley (on pp.243-244). As a young student book-reviewer, she quickly learned that you would never attract criticism or strife if you wrote only positive reviews. Write reviews that are honest criticism and the world falls on your head. From writing honest criticism, I know this to be true.