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A review by saltygalreads
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
5.0
Birnham Wood is a difficult book to describe. It is a drama. It is a character study. It is a thriller. It is about human character and relationships. It is about environmental carnage and greed. It is about the complex motivations behind special interest groups and their delicate relationship with private business sponsorship. It is timely and very of-the-moment.
I will vastly oversimplify the plot as follows: a young group of environmental activists in New Zealand, calling themselves Birnham Wood, utilizes vacant spaces – empty lots, unused public grounds, etc. – to plant a variety of crops. They consider themselves a “guerrilla gardening collective” – demonstrating the effective use of land to produce natural foods for public consumption, and pushing back against the private ownership of land. Money, as it always is for special interest groups, is tight and the group lives hand-to-mouth. A landslide in the Korowai Pass mountain region closes a large area, including a former sheep farm called Thorndike, and this presents a golden opportunity for the group, with a large parcel of land going unused and relatively cut off. However this same chunk of land, bordering on a national park, has also caught the interest of a shrewd American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who is negotiating a sale with the farm’s owners so that he can build an end-of-days bunker and bolt hole, or so he says. Can the two sides navigate their differences and occupy the same land?
I was fascinated by the characters in this book – their public face versus private, their motivations and thought processes. Mira Bunting is the founder of Birnham Wood – wealthy, intelligent, arrogant, and idealistic yet conniving. Shelley Noakes is Mira’s right-hand person and a co-founder of the group, with a head for organization and logistics – clever, self-deprecating and disenchanted with Birnham Wood. Owen Darvish is the owner of Thorndike, and a caricature of the about-to-be-knighted, middle-aged white male who congratulates himself on his “self-made” success. Robert Lemoine is the charismatic, chill billionaire who created Autonomo, a drone tech company. He is a psychopath – charming, friendly, ruthless, manipulative and cold-blooded.
There are so many quotable passages in this book, in particular social, economic and political commentary, with heavy doses of satire that made me chuckle. Catton’s comments on the generational divide were especially insightful and amusing: “At Birnham Wood ‘Shelley’s mum’ had become a kind of shorthand for the many evils of the baby-boomer generation, a despised cohort of hoarders and plunderers from which Mira’s own parents, who had recently separated, always seemed mysteriously to be exempt”.
While some readers may find the first half of the book a little slow, this is where the reader understands the characters and what drives them; setting up the faster moving second half where the thriller aspect of the novel takes the reader on twists and turns. No spoilers here, but I will only say that the conclusion simultaneously blew my mind and broke my heart. You will not forget this book. A classic in the making.
I will vastly oversimplify the plot as follows: a young group of environmental activists in New Zealand, calling themselves Birnham Wood, utilizes vacant spaces – empty lots, unused public grounds, etc. – to plant a variety of crops. They consider themselves a “guerrilla gardening collective” – demonstrating the effective use of land to produce natural foods for public consumption, and pushing back against the private ownership of land. Money, as it always is for special interest groups, is tight and the group lives hand-to-mouth. A landslide in the Korowai Pass mountain region closes a large area, including a former sheep farm called Thorndike, and this presents a golden opportunity for the group, with a large parcel of land going unused and relatively cut off. However this same chunk of land, bordering on a national park, has also caught the interest of a shrewd American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who is negotiating a sale with the farm’s owners so that he can build an end-of-days bunker and bolt hole, or so he says. Can the two sides navigate their differences and occupy the same land?
I was fascinated by the characters in this book – their public face versus private, their motivations and thought processes. Mira Bunting is the founder of Birnham Wood – wealthy, intelligent, arrogant, and idealistic yet conniving. Shelley Noakes is Mira’s right-hand person and a co-founder of the group, with a head for organization and logistics – clever, self-deprecating and disenchanted with Birnham Wood. Owen Darvish is the owner of Thorndike, and a caricature of the about-to-be-knighted, middle-aged white male who congratulates himself on his “self-made” success. Robert Lemoine is the charismatic, chill billionaire who created Autonomo, a drone tech company. He is a psychopath – charming, friendly, ruthless, manipulative and cold-blooded.
There are so many quotable passages in this book, in particular social, economic and political commentary, with heavy doses of satire that made me chuckle. Catton’s comments on the generational divide were especially insightful and amusing: “At Birnham Wood ‘Shelley’s mum’ had become a kind of shorthand for the many evils of the baby-boomer generation, a despised cohort of hoarders and plunderers from which Mira’s own parents, who had recently separated, always seemed mysteriously to be exempt”.
While some readers may find the first half of the book a little slow, this is where the reader understands the characters and what drives them; setting up the faster moving second half where the thriller aspect of the novel takes the reader on twists and turns. No spoilers here, but I will only say that the conclusion simultaneously blew my mind and broke my heart. You will not forget this book. A classic in the making.