In Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, three young New Zealanders and a middle-aged American billionaire have interwoven plans for a vacant ranch on the South Island, at the base of the (fictional) Korowai National Park.
Mira Bunting, a 29-year-old horticultural student, founded a guerilla collective, Birnam Wood, which plants veggies on otherwise unused parcels of land. Her sidekick, Shelley Noakes, provides organizational nous and stability to Mira’s headstrong activism. Tony Gallo, who left soon after the group began has returned, hoping to rekindle an imagined romance with Mira and kick-start a journalism career.
After learning that the ranch in question, belonging to the recently knighted Owen Darvish and his wife Judy, has been effectively abandoned while Darvish pursues his pest control business on the North Island, Mira investigates the planting possibilities on the Darvish property. There she accidently meets Robert Lemoine, who has made a fortune in various tech companies, most recently a drone business. He, too, has plans for the land, but they don’t involve seedlings or fertilizer.
Mira and Lemoine quickly form a partnership. Lemoine offers money to the group, hoping to use them as a cover for his mysterious activities. Mira sees the funding as a kickstarter towards respectability and a sustainable proposition.
At the hui – a leaderless meeting of the collective, held in a circle – to announce Lemoine’s offer, Tony re-appears and proceeds to burn his bridges with the gang through a multi-page rant against capitalism, environmental depredation, intersectionality, and neoliberalism. In other words, he’s an angry young Marxist without a compass.
Each of these protagonists changes as their individual agendas collide and they evolve into fully drawn complex personalities. Each of the heroes also has at least one foot of clay. Mira is a scheming, ambitious idealist. Shelley is a frustrated second banana who benefits from the loyalty she has shown to Mira and her project. Lemoine appears at first to be in the game for fun, but his lack of transparency and unlimited resources foreshadow a darker side.
Tony may be the most complex character. He is introduced as a shy romantic, reveals a dissatisfaction with most aspects of modern society, then proceeds to show remarkable resilience and ingenuity as he tracks Lemoine’s plans to their deadly end.
Catton’s writing is fluid, easily digested most of the time. But every so often, she crams multiple ideas into one sentence, comma after comma stretching for 100 words or more through the depth of an almost undecipherable paragraph. And, two-thirds of the way through the book, Mira and Shelley, after speaking with intelligence and maturity up till then, begin to throw “like” into every other sentence. This tic comes and goes for a while, and then disappears.
The tale is well-constructed. Catton is economical in the way she provides new information and action which drives the narrative to its racing conclusion. What starts out as a gentle exploration of flower children trying to change the world one planting at a time becomes a page-turning thriller when the truth of Lemoine’s activities is discovered by Tony.