Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, is a political and psychological cliff-hanger where characters do indeed fall of cliffs in a remote area of New Zealand. Catton is on record for stating that she knew in advance the ending of this plot-driven novel, but was unsure how to get there. By the end she does succeed in tying up all the loose threads. Her characters are well drawn and intersect in multiple directions, but the reader needs to play close attention to her third-person narration, for the omniscient narrator provides the points of view of several major characters. Moreover, her narrator serves as a conduit for the modes of perception – specifically phones and drones – that connect characters and landscape. 

The opening sentence gives a sense of impending doom: “The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of the highway in rubble, killing five.” Since the fragile ecosystem is one central focus of the novel, it is not surprising to see the earth swallow mankind, for humanities’ failure to address the earth is itself part of the tragedy of the ecosystem. In a novel based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the reader may expect more burials to follow in an avalanche of capitalist ventures, adventures, and misadventures. The “trigger” at the beginning comes full circle in the trigger of an air rifle at the end; and in between, suspenseful events trigger a fast-paced plot. 

The novel’s title refers to Shakespeare’s play, as well as an activist gardening collective in New Zealand that is well-meaning, but has to contend with ideological debates within its own ego-invested membership: “Birnam Wood was now a start-up, a pop-up, the brainchild of ‘creatives’; it was organic, it was local; it was a bit like Uber; it was a bit like Airbnb.” From Macbeth’s Scotland to Catton’s New Zealand, Birnam Wood moves from the local to the global, especially when the group is pitted against an American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, whose capitalist interest in the spoils of New Zealand’s minerals manipulates the members of the younger group. “An aura of prescience now permeated Birnam Wood,” just as an aura of omniscience permeates the narrator. 

In the history of narration the nineteenth-century novel stands out for the master narratives of Dickens and George Eliot, among others, and their connection to the panopticon, whose practice and theories of observation relate to the regulation of society, particularly in regard to prison structures. There, the guard in the watchtower oversees the cells of the inmates who remain under scrutiny. Fast forward to the twenty-first century with Catton employing drones to scrutinize New Zealand’s landscape and all trespassers around the Korowai property owned by recently knighted Owen Darvish, and his wife Lady Jill Darvish. (Ironically his surname is related to the Sufi dervish: the landed owner ends up whirling off his own property, part of a series of displacements.) If there is collusion between Darvish and the government, then this becomes even more corrupt once he enters into a devil’s bargain with Lemoine, whose drone company, Autonomo, is subject to narrative scrutiny. Catton’s omniscient narrator focuses her camera, not only on the landscape, but also on the interior lives of her characters as they enter the labyrinths of neoliberalism, late capitalism, and dystopian possibilities.  

Mira Bunting, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of Birnam Wood, is interested in Darvish’s property, which has been quietly withdrawn from sale. Under an alias, June Crowther, she emails the realtor; her alias is the first of many aliases in the novel that belong to an overall pattern of deception. If spying and lying are central themes in Birnam Wood, then phones and drones are the means for achieving these devious ends. On her browser (a compact panopticon) Mira calls up a map of the farm and village of Thorndike. As the narrator hovers over the screen and landscape, she also enters Mira’s mind: “it was a private habit, formed in girlhood, to berate herself with morbid hypotheticals.” The psychic and seismic quakes and landslides within and among characters become less hypothetical as the plot propels forward under the watchful eye of an omniscient narrator.  

Shortly after we are introduced to Mira, the narrator switches focus to her friend Shelley Noakes. The abrupt transition from Mira’s laptop is filtered through Shelley’s phone, a spying screen that reduces characters to coloured circles, digital badges of their identities: “Five minutes later the yellow circle labelled ‘Mira’ pulled out into the street and began moving slowly north. Shelley Noakes reduced the scale of the map until her own circle, a gently pulsing blue, appeared at the edge of the screen, and watched the yellow disc advance imperceptibly upon the blue for almost thirty seconds before turning off the phone.” This interaction between yellow and blue discs characterizes the fraught relationship between the two women in charge of Birnam Wood. The narrator examines Shelley’s background where her mother is in conflict with Mira who dismisses Mrs. Noakes’s neoliberalism and late capitalism. Whereas Shelley is accustomed to “the ritual deference to all opposing views,” Mira tells her that she is “benighted, repressed, and in conflict with her mother.” These mind games extend to most of the conflicted characters in Birnam Wood where the narrator analyzes rituals of opposing points of view from the be-knighted to the benighted. Catton’s satire prevents the novel from turning into a roman à thèse amidst all these political debates. 

Mira instructs her fellow members of Birnam Wood: “It’s about keeping control of the narrative.” Her comment certainly applies to the omniscient narrator who has her finger on every trigger, on the pulse of each character and the pace of the plot. A paragraph begins with Mira working the land: “Mira severed the weeds at the root and flicked them neatly away, sever-and-flick, sever-and-flick, sever-and-flick.” Aside from its insistent rhythm, the sentence recalls Shakespeare’s Birnam Wood that appears in the novel’s epigraph: “Unfix his earth-bound root.” Catton’s characters are severed and flicked in her New Zealand tragedy. In the same paragraph we observe Mira’s gaze advancing on the horizon: “she looked up at the ridge again, scanning it carefully this time, as though to make it seem, for the benefit of anyone who might be watching – which was ridiculous; nobody was – that she had been alerted by the sound of something else entirely.” Reader, narrator, and drone are watching, for the sound belongs to Shakespeare’s subtext and Lemoine’s hovering drone – Autonomo’s omniscience. The panopticon of the nineteenth century is replaced by the drone of the twenty-first with its own forms of incarceration at a remote spot on earth. 

Yet this sound and fury, sever-and-flick, is not complete, for the very next sentence offers another point of view: “Then she started, for silhouetted against the sky was a lone man in a red jacket.” This figure in the ground belongs to Tony Gallo, a journalist who eventually uncovers the truth above and under the ground to reveal pollution and Lemoine’s scheme. At the very end of the novel Tony resurfaces in an apocalyptic scene: “as the fire began to blaze and crackle up the ancient trees behind him, Tony prayed that somebody would come to put it out.” Birnam Wood is a burning wood that blazes and crackles, yet some meaning is still missing, despite its omniscient narration. Characters exchange messages that occasionally go undelivered because of Lemoine’s interference, yet Lemoine himself finds the situation “too messy, too multiple.” 

Opposed to Lemoine’s demonic drones is his airplane which provides another overview of the world; a long aeronautical sentence begins with: “When in flight, he experienced a double realignment.” The shrinking and dilation of the universe ends in his descent: “a holy sense of having pilgrimaged, of returning, having seen behind a veil.” Catton’s drones and double realignments transport us through a dark wood, veiled then unveiled. Lemoine’s plane realigns with his drones: “the drone itself presented on a plinth and shot from below to give a sense of majesty, the camera housing gleaming.” Catton’s camera work and panoptic narration control vision: “The picture changed again to the drone’s perspective, now circling the man.” Birnam Wood encircles Shakespeare, a variety of characters, and New Zealand’s pristine and morally polluted landscape. 

In their own form of captivity Mira and Shelley work on a complex jigsaw puzzle: “After the pieces were all picture-side up, she began to sort them into categories, discovering to her contentment that the texture of the retriever’s fur and the repeated weave of the basket made the puzzle much more challenging than she might have expected for a thousand-piece.” When Mira gives up, Shelley takes over and realizes that the pieces don’t fit, but eventually finds a match: “the finished patches had taken on a cobbled shine that begged to be stroked and smoothed with the flat of a hand.” All the pieces of Birnam Wood fit together, but perhaps some should remain missing for a greater mystery to emerge. The two women work on a second puzzle – this time, of the Venetian Grand Canal, a final patch of water still eluding them. Mira looks down at the unfinished Grand Canal: “She stared at the toothy vacant patch in the middle of the picture for a while in silence, and then she sighed, sat down, and began to fit the final pieces” – a process not unlike what Catton has done with her novel. With all its debates, political ideologies, surveillance, and characters disappearing in their phones, Birnam Woods rushes towards a roman à thèse. 


Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestseller The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Born in London, Ontario, and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart (March 7 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771024371
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771024375

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.