Great expectations

Fans of Eleanor Catton have been waiting patiently for the follow up to her sprawling 2013 Victorian-era novel The Luminaries. Then just 28, the Canadian-born former New Zealander (now living in the U.K.) became the youngest ever winner of the Booker Prize, (and with the longest book, at around 800 pages), and also took home the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.

And while her new novel Birnam Wood is a decidedly different animal than The Luminaries, it is no less satisfying — maybe more so, albeit in very different ways.

At just north of 400 pages and set in 2017 New Zealand — with a modern cast including an eccentric and deceitful American billionaire, an aspiring journalist and a troupe of guerilla gardeners — it will prove far less daunting to a wider range of prospective readers.

At the heart of Birnam Wood are issues surrounding property, capitalism, conservation and ecological destruction, social media and surveillance — all pulled together nearly seamlessly in a book that gets progressively more propulsive, moving from literary ensemble piece to eco-thriller with ease.

The guerrilla gardening group, Birnam Wood (a hat-tip to Shakespeare’s Macbeth), is made up mainly of young activists, and readers follow three of them throughout the book — Mira Bunting, the de facto head of Birnam Wood, her often-overlooked best friend Shelley Noakes and Tony Gallo, who left the group some years back but has returned.

After a landslide near a national park on the South Island, 29-year-old Mira heads to the area to explore whether Birnam Wood might be able to set up shop nearby. A former sheep farm owned by acclaimed conservationist Sir Owen Darvish looks promising, and it’s here Mira encounters Robert Lemoine, the eccentric billionaire, on the property.

Lemoine has made his fortune in drones and other surveillance technology, and tells Mira he’s about to buy Darvish’s property and set up a bunker there to live out any potential global catastrophes. He’s a dodgy, paranoid fellow, carrying multiple phones and booking rooms in multiple hotels when he travels to evade… well, whoever. Throughout the book he manipulates other characters’ mobile phones, while drones buzz overhead many of the scenes, allowing Lemoine to keep tabs on everyone.

Mira is shocked when Lemoine offers to fund Birnam Wood and have them set up shop on the property. She returns to the group and pitches the idea, which sends Tony off in a huff, igniting his quest to expose Lemoine and the goings-on around Darvish’s property.

Tony has good reason to be skeptical of Lemoine — it turns out one of his nefarious plans involves the extraction of rare and wildly valuable minerals from the national park, where the landslide occurred and which was caused by said extraction.

Meanwhile, Lemoine cozies up to the Birnam Wood crew, particularly Mira and Shelley, and the group eventually let their guard down around him.

When a character is killed about two thirds of the way through Birnam Wood, the action, pace and and tension of the novel really ramp up, yet Catton doesn’t sacrifice her rich, Dickensian prose throughout.

The final third of the novel moves at breakneck speed, as it careens toward the explosive ending which, despite the many hints that things won’t end well, will leave readers with mouths agape. No one comes off looking good here.

Catton successfully grapples with serious ecological and psychological themes (with doses of humour) as she builds the tension gradually, and then rapidly, between the characters who, despite being typecast, will prove familiar to readers.

It’s a novel that never feels too long or too dense, its storyline bringing rich literary components and tackling moral quandaries without ever feeling preachy or clunky. The decade-long wait was more than worth it.

Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press literary editor.

If you value coverage of Manitoba’s arts scene, help us do more.
Your contribution of $10, $25 or more will allow the Free Press to deepen our reporting on theatre, dance, music and galleries while also ensuring the broadest possible audience can access our arts journalism. BECOME AN ARTS JOURNALISM SUPPORTER Click here to learn more about the project.