Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton's new novel, Birnam Wood, is a moral thriller for our times
Birnam Wood is on the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist
In 2013, Canadian-born, New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton made history when she became the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize. Catton was just 28 years old and her novel, The Luminaries, went on to become an international bestseller – 1.5 million copies sold worldwide, and it was published in 32 languages.
Catton also broke another Booker record – at over 800 pages, The Luminaries remains the longest winner ever. Catton adapted The Luminaries for a BBC TV miniseries and also wrote the screenplay for Autumn de Wilde's 2020 film production of Jane Austen's Emma.
Now, Eleanor Catton is back with a much anticipated new novel, Birnam Wood – an eco-thriller that's part satire, part tragedy.
Set in New Zealand's South Island, it's the story of an activist guerrilla gardening collective and their involvement with an American billionaire. He's in New Zealand ostensibly to build a doomsday bunker where he can escape possible global catastrophe – but in reality, he's much more dangerous.
The novel engages with some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the climate crisis, digital surveillance and rampant economic inequality.
Catton spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in Cambridge, England.
Birnam Wood is on the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The shortlist will be announced on Oct. 11.
An ominous name
"Birnam Wood is, of course, taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth. It's the woods about which Macbeth is told that he will never be vanquished until this wood comes to the castle where he lives. Macbeth takes it as a statement of impossibility, because he's not really thinking creatively enough about military strategy, and the ways in which that might come to pass.
"In my novel, it's the name that a group of activists give to themselves. They're broadly anti-capitalist, left-wing activists, who go about the South Island of New Zealand planting sustainable, edible gardens in neglected spaces. Sometimes it's in collaboration with the property owners in a kind of a bartering scheme, but more often illegally, and as an act of protest. And so the book follows their fortunes.
They're broadly anti-capitalist, left-wing activists, who go about the South Island of New Zealand planting sustainable, edible gardens in neglected spaces.- Eleanor Catton
"It's something that I see around me a lot. I live in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, now and there are guerrilla gardeners here. You often see verges planted with kale and chard and all the rest of it. And in Christchurch, which is where the book is partly set, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes, there were a lot of quite interesting community initiatives to reclaim spaces."
The morality of literature
"I think that a novel is fundamentally a moral form because it deals with time, and for that reason, a novel is capable of showing you an action and then the consequences of that action.
"So many of the problems that we face in the world today arise out of there being no mechanism to judge the consequences of an action. Very often a politician will come in and introduce devastating policies, and then they'll be gone by the time those policies bear fruit.
So many of the problems that we face in the world today arise out of there being no mechanism to judge the consequences of an action.- Eleanor Catton
"The same goes for companies, the same goes for pretty much anything you can think of. There aren't good enough mechanisms to link actions to the consequences and then to have a serious conversation about responsibilities at that point.
"But a novel can do that, because a novel is situated in time. It uses time – time is its medium by situating you, the reader, in the body and in the mind of somebody else. That's such a profound and moral gift that the novel can offer."
Capitalism at all costs
"Capitalism is a system that is fundamentally sociopathic or psychopathic, in that it rewards a certain kind of game thinking, a game-oriented thinking. It's scornful of people who try to incorporate other considerations beyond the relentless self-advancement or profit seeking that it's really all about.
With the billionaire character Robert Lemoine, I wanted to create this almost Dickensian, larger-than-life character, partly as a way of satirizing this cultural worship we have of figures like this.- Eleanor Catton
"With the billionaire character Robert Lemoine, I wanted to create this almost Dickensian, larger-than-life character, partly as a way of satirizing this cultural worship we have of figures like this. I think that, really, he ought to be a lot less believable than he is."
Tough love
"I wanted to write a novel that wasn't burdened by scores that I wanted to settle or anything like that, but instead would be light enough on its feet that it would be able to take the reader on their own adventure, and give them a good time.
In the same way that we all laugh at our families and our friends, but it's a loving kind of laughter, there's a way that we satirize the people around us so well, even though it's probably more bitingly than we would be able to satirize people whom we don't love and we've never met.- Eleanor Catton
"I believe very strongly that the affection that Jane Austen just clearly had for all of her characters — which is especially true of Emma as a book, I think — is so important to the satire because it creates the sense of intimacy for you as a reader. You feel like these are your family, these are your friends.
"In the same way that we all laugh at our families and our friends, but it's a loving kind of laughter, there's a way that we satirize the people around us so well, even though it's probably more bitingly than we would be able to satirize people whom we don't love and we've never met."
Learning from your characters
"When I look back at the characters and I read the passages of the book that are quite penetrating about their state of mind, I'm often surprised at what they teach me about myself. As a writer, there's something so Freudian — the kind of self-searching — about the process of writing a book. You don't always know why an image strolls into your mind, you don't always know where something is going, or what it means until afterwards.
When I look back at the characters and I read the passages of the book that are quite penetrating about their state of mind, I'm often surprised at what they teach me about myself.- Eleanor Catton
"I think that teaches you a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses as a thinker, and it's not always a very pleasant experience."
Eleanor Catton's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
