An introspective eco-thriller

Being a wuss, I was put off reading Catton’s Booker Prize winning, 800+ paged The Luminaries because it seemed too lengthy, but now I suspect I should just bite the bullet and try it out. Simply because her latest, Birnam Wood, is so very readable. Birnam Wood is also over 400+ pages, but that’s still only half the length of her Booker winning novel. Birnam Wood is a whodunnit of a kind – where we already know who dun what, but it remains to be seen who will be captured, who will be held to account.

Birnam Wood is a left-leaning collective set in New Zealand’s South Island, which sets out to plant food on private but unused land. It is founded by Mira Bunting, run with a handful of do-gooders, and Mira’s side kick and the collective’s administrator, Shelley Noakes. Shelley met Mira when she was 21, and Mira was 24, and Shelley had been immediately infatuated by Mira, and all her difference and daring.

“Cast virtually from birth in the role of the family peacemaker, and praised throughout her adolescence for having cost her parents not a single night of sleep, Shelley had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable – a fate even more terrible than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationship with others, but her private judgement of herself. It was only under Mira’s influence that she learned, if not to overcome this terror, then at least to direct the blame of it elsewhere” (p12).

This is the introspective way Catton tends to write, revealing the inner life of her characters in great detail.

Several years pass, and now Shelley, who had been Mira’s housemate and helpmeet, wants out. Out of the collective, and out of Mira’s life. Almost like a love affair which is now over, and a break up imminent. Meanwhile, Mira who had been obsessed with somehow getting Birnam Wood to ‘make good’, i.e. be financially sustainable, gets an unexpected offer. She had been trespassing in Thorndike,  a town which had been closed of by a recent landslide, owned by the newly knighted Owen Darvish. Mira had not known the billionaire, American Robert Lemoire, had a secret plan to buy up the land. To Darvish and his wife, Lemoire conveys that he wants to build a bunker, a doomsday scenario set up. But what Lemoire really wants is to dig up the earth which contains raw metals and minerals, which will enable him to not only become even richer, but to give him control and power even beyond those of governments. When he catches Mira trespassing, he sees the Birnam Woods collective as something he could utilise in this scheme.

Unaware of his lies, Mira comes back to her group’s hui – meeting – and reveals Lemoire has put ten thousand dollars into her account, and will pay them a hundred thousand to do their illegal planting work in Thorndike, which he assures them he already owns, though the sale cannot yet be made public. Apparently he likes them because they are so off-grid. Into this mix, comes Tony, one of the original founders of the Birnam Wood group, and Mira’s sort-of boyfriend at the time. Tony has just returned to New Zealand after several years away, and is attending his first hui for a long while. Not only do he and Mira have unfinished business, Tony vociferously protests this offer from Lemoire, and there are some long passages of his rants, which is maybe where Catton allows herself the indulgence of preaching the leftist anticorporate and anticapitalist messages. Mira counters that

“Sure, in an ideal world, would people like Robert Lemoire exist? No. But in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need this opportunity. We wouldn’t be massively in debt. We wouldn’t be struggling every day to get our message out. We wouldn’t be in fucking existentialist crisis mode every single minute of our lives” (p119)

Tony still argues she is selling out.

So while Mira and Shelley take a team and go to Thorndike to begin planting, Tony intends to investigate Lemoire and Darvish all by himself, and try to write a reportage journalistic piece which will both blow their cover and make his name. Tony himself is also struggling for a place, identity, and validation since he arrived back in New Zealand,

“Tony’s homecoming had been unexpectedly dispiriting. He was sensitive to condescension, and had detected in his siblings a kind of provincial triumph that the terms of his visa had at last obliged him to return” (p28)

Catton is at her best when she is writing about characters’ motivations and inner thoughts. In a way, the first half with the set up of the context and scene, and revealing of the characters’ agendas and backgrounds, was better reading than the second half, which mostly was just to play out the story, watch the various actors all descend on the same location and the various scenes that play out consequently.

The plot does not lose pace, but it does become a bit more two dimensional, as characterisation is taken over by plotline, and even major protagonists, like Lemoire and Mira and Tony, become caricatures of themselves, almost robotically filling their places and stances. That said, this book is immensely readable, the pages flew by, and it is so well written that despite the heavy detailing, it never loses steam or its thread. Hence my wondering now if I dare attempt The Luminaries.

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