Birnam Wood

By Eleanor Catton

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux     2023

432 pages     Literary

Where to start on the best book I have read this year? The setting? The South Island of New Zealand. The time frame? 2017. The cast? A group of environmental idealists called Birnam Wood and their primary members, Shelley and Mira. A would-be journalist named Tony. An American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, and a newly knighted businessman and his wife, Sir Owen and Lady Jill Darvish. The plot? OMG, the plot! The plot would be nothing without this cast of amazingly-written characters, each so important to the plot that it would be nothing if the reader hadn’t come to know the characters so intimately.

Mira and Shelley are the organizers and leaders of a gardening collective named Birnam Wood. The group’s purpose is to plant trees, plants and vegetables on unused or abandoned land on the South Island of New Zealand. Mira has heard about a huge farm close to a national park that has been abandoned because of a gigantic landslide and decides that this might be the next big project for Birnam Wood. Early in the plan, she comes in contact with the American techno billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who also has his eyes on the farmland, but for far different reasons. He realizes that Birnam Wood might be the perfect coverup for his nefarious plans, and he convinces Mira that he has just bought the farm from Sir Owen Darvish. He offers Mira considerable money to come and use the land for their environmental purposes. Mira and Shelley bring the group to the farm, and they settle in, ready to farm the land. A former member of the group, Tony, has a lot of questions about a collective taking so much money from an American billionaire, and he sees the potential for a major exposé that will guarantee him a journalism career. Sir Owen Darvish only has understood little bits and pieces about Lemoine’s plans for his family farm, and his wife, Jill, knows nothing. The set-up is complete, and the plot begins.

The story line would go nowhere without 21^st century technology, and the vast amount of knowledge that Lemoine uses to manipulate the scene with technology of all sorts. His money has come from his drone company, and he uses those drones to monitor everything that happens on the farm. He also is able to drop in on the group and manipulate their cell phones and laptops and on and on. In this way, he controls all the situations and people like puppets. One reviewer compared Lemoine to Elon Musk, and I had Musk’s image in my mind throughout the book. I was quite impressed that Catton understood the technology so well that she was able to use it so successfully in her plot.

This is an incredible book, extremely clever and innovative. The set-up is amazing, and when the plot really began to take off, I almost had to hold my breath, because I had become so entrenched with the characters that I knew that nothing good was going to happen to any of them. And I will say no more about plot.

I can’t say enough about Catton as an author. One reviewer said, “Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice for most of us, is an act of self-definition.” For instance, Shelley worries about why she has a constant sense of dread. “She was trying to escape it now, but she would never escape it, because she could not feel the difference, could not understand the difference, between running toward something, and running away.” All the characters are very clearly defined and identifiable without being caricatures. I can’t say that I identified with any of them, but I sure knew who they were.

I have been to the South Island of New Zealand, and I hoped that I might have been to the national park described in the book, but Catton mentioned in the afterword that all the locations were made up.  I became intrigued with the book when I read a terrific review in The New Yorker, and then remembered that I had been given access to a copy of the book from the publisher. I highly recommend Birnam Wood.

The New Yorker review.