Eleanor Catton discusses Birnam Wood, plotted novels and psychological immersion

Eleanor Catton is sticking up for entertaining the reader. “Escapism gets framed as though it’s an abdication of responsibility—like, who’s reading novels while the world is burning?—but actually, what kind of world do we want? One where people are reading.” Ten years on from The Luminaries, the labyrinthine epic set in gold rush New Zealand that made her the youngest-ever Booker Prize winner, Catton returns with her third novel, a satirical contemporary thriller destined to set 2023 ablaze.

Political but not partisan, Birnam Wood is a book that demands attention, not by pompously insisting on its own significance, but by engaging juicily and incisively with today’s moral questions through the thoughts and actions of its vividly realised cast. Much of the past three years has been spent discussing the characters with her husband, so much so that they feel especially real to her. “I’ve never had a book like that before.”

In a literary landscape where intricate, 19th century-style plotting has fallen from vogue, the New Zealand writer, currently based in Cambridge in the UK, stands out as its loyal defender. “The moral development of people in plotted novels where people make choices is fascinating and important. I’d like to see more books like that.” In Birnam Wood, a social novel born of the political upheavals of 2016—the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump—she looks to that master architect of plot: Shakespeare.

I struggle with an excess of self-criticism that borders on self-loathing, so to repeat myself often would activate that part of myself

Birnam Wood transports the ideas of “Macbeth” to New Zealand in 2017, but it’s far from a direct retelling, which Catton often finds tedious (and she does not believe in boring her readers). Instead, every lead character is a plausible contender for the role of Macbeth, with a Lady Macbeth figure beside them. Noticing in 2016 that everyone around her (including herself) had become adept at diagnosing Macbeth-like qualities in others but not in themselves, she set out to play with the notion that nobody thinks they are the bad guy.

The story opens with a landslide cutting off a town on New Zealand’s South Island; it leads to local businessman Sir Owen Darvish and his wife Jill withdrawing their nearby farm from the property market. This piques the interest of Mira Bunting, founder of a guerrilla gardening collective called Birnam Wood, who goes to scope out the land as a potential planting site. There, she is apprehended by enigmatic tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, who claims to have secretly bought the property and offers to sponsor Birnam Wood. When Mira’s old flame, aspiring journalist Tony Gallo, gets wind of this, he starts sniffing around, certain there is something rotten concealed beneath the foliage.

All these players converge on Catton’s rural stage-set, setting in motion a dance of deception worthy of Shakespeare himself—or indeed Jane Austen, the book’s “unlikely godmother”. Drawing on her screenwriting experience (adaptations of Emma and The Luminaries, and other ongoing projects), Catton thought about Birnam Wood in terms of a three-act structure and tried to adhere to screenwriting laws—but, keen to capitalise on the psychological immersion afforded by the novel form, she didn’t write it with adaptation in mind. As with The Luminaries, she knew what the ending would be when she began but had “no idea” how she was going to get there.

I like the irony of it, it speaks to the whole project of fiction. A novel is not true, but a good novel is deeply true

Aristotle said a story should feel both surprising and inevitable, but Catton thinks “being surprising is the way to go”. Indeed, this literary shapeshifter’s three books are notably distinct. “I struggle with an excess of self-criticism that borders on self-loathing, so to repeat myself often would activate that part of myself.” Yet deception is the common thread between the trio. “I like the irony of it, it speaks to the whole project of fiction. A novel is not true, but a good novel is deeply true.”

Birnam Wood illuminates the moral damage that our insatiable demand for technology has wrought on society, and the sheer creepiness of the surveillance that saturates our daily lives. Characters spy on one another, using means from location tracking and surreptitious Googling to drones and digital trickery. The surveillance theme derives from “Macbeth”, where the witches (Shakespeare’s answer to smartphones) provide foreknowledge. And crucially, lest you’re feeling too comfortable, this is a book about complicity—of governments, organisations and individuals—that refuses to let its readers off the hook.

In a sense, writing a novel where “the plot has consequences, and there is a difference between saying and doing” is Catton’s response to the moral confusion created by social media, which she believes has collapsed those distinctions. “I wanted it to be a corrective, not a symptom, of the things that really annoy me about the contemporary malaise.” It is also a plea for open communication—which could have averted every disaster in the book—in the face of terrifying uncertainties. “That’s my formal answer to the climate crisis: because human beings are so innovative, we can do it, but whether we will... I’m very worried.”

A Millennial herself, Catton is interested in how generational conflict plays out, and her cast spans from the boomer Darvishes, sitting pretty with their wealth and shiny new knighthood (New Zealand reinstated the honours in 2009), to Machiavellian Gen-X billionaire Lemoine and crusading Millennials Tony and Mira. She deliberately omitted a Māori perspective because she wanted to satirise the relationship people have with the land, the arbitrariness of who owns it, and it didn’t feel appropriate to satirise that of an indigenous person.

New Zealanders are so used to occupying a position globally where they are not morally culpable

Catton—born in Canada to an American father and New Zealand mother, and raised in New Zealand—is surely a source of great national pride, but the feeling doesn’t seem to be mutual. With its wry commentary on national identity and its roots in real events, such as the government’s controversial 2010 proposal to mine national parks, Birnam Wood offers a stinging critique of New Zealand, which Catton believes has benefited from a “very flattering and not always accurate self-image”. Lemoine is partly inspired by billionaire Peter Thiel, who was granted citizenship after spending only 12 days in the country, which attracts foreign wealth with its low tax rates. “New Zealanders are so used to occupying a position globally where they are not morally culpable. If this book provokes anything, I want it to provoke that conversation.”

It also explores fault lines among the contemporary Left, embodied in a brilliant argument scene where Tony alienates members of Birnam Wood with Marxist lecturing. Yet although Catton is clearly disenchanted with the failures of the Left to keep capitalism in check, she’s careful to ensure that no single character fully represents her point of view. She’s “a little apprehensive” about promoting the book, observing that cultural expectations of writers have changed since she last toured, and the line between art and activism has become increasingly blurred. Yet she believes the two are very different. If you set out to write an activist novel, “you will betray the art because at some level you believe it’s less important than this other goal of changing people’s minds”.