A superbly tense eco thriller set in the mountains of New Zealand, this explores what happens when those who choose to operate outside of the system change their mind and broker a deal with capitalism. It looks at whether you can retain your ethics and moral stance when you hop into bed with big, bad business. This has real pace and momentum. There is never a moment when you are not on the edge of your seat here. It's clever without ever losing sight of the fact that it is a book that has to entertain and grip you and it introduces big, meaty subjects in such a way as to make you think without distracting you from an extremely good read.

i found this just so unexpected and fascinating—half-satire, half-melodrama, funny and disquieting, meandering at the start, almost a thriller in its last act, and then ending as something new entirely. v much recommended!

I was a little disappointed by this book, but it was always going to be hard for Eleanor to right another novel on par with The Luminaries. It was a little too preachy for my liking I'm afraid, but I hope it does well as it has the makings of a great eco-thriller, just not for me!

Thanks to Net Galley for letting me read.
This is a clever, complicated book about a group of environmentalists in New Zealand. Eleanor Catton interweaves many stories and themes. Ultimately, the many parts don’t entirely sing from the same song sheet but highly enjoyable and provocative.

This could have been a really good thriller - guerilla gardening outfit set up in a tech billionaire’s wilderness retreat, he discovers them, things start going wrong, suspicions are raised - and then the ending, goodness me that was bleak. On this level I really enjoyed the book. I could grasp the ecological issues being tackled and could identify the goodies and the baddies.

However for some reason the author decided that I needed to be lectured on environmental politics. Suddenly characters would go on and on, for pages, spouting off like earnest sixth formers telling their parents that they know nothing. I get enough of that at home - I am not really sure why it is there, as the plot deals with these issues in a far more entertaining and gripping fashion.

irnam Wood tells the story of a radical gardening collective of the same name, and the events that ensue when they encounter an American billionaire Robert Lemoine. Lemoine has befriended a New Zealand executive called Owen Darvish and is planning to buy his farm on the edge of a national park. As far as Darvish is concerned, Lemoine is building a ‘doom-steading’ bunker; however, Lemoine is actually planning to illegally mine the land for rare earth minerals, ensuring his position as the world’s wealthiest man. A freak accident changes the lives of Darvish, Lemoine and the members of the collective immeasurably and leads to a chain of events, which will culminate in a disaster of Shakespearean proportions.

Written in short sections, each from the viewpoint of different characters and moving back and forth across short spaces of time, the structure of the novel is delightfully complex, leaving gaps in the readers knowledge which build tension and suspense. It’s a thrilling blend of satire, eco-thriller and page turner which addresses many of today’s hottest topics: the pillaging of late capitalism, the perils inherent in the growing use of technology, surveillance and social media and the growing threat of environmental collapse.

The novel pulls no punches when exploring who might be to blame for our modern ills, but avoids being didactic, instead offering up a Shakespearean influenced, page-turning thriller that is addictively entertaining and will keep you guessing until the final paragraph.

A weighty novel giving thought to those trying to preserve a way of life through preservation and a capitalist after riches.
A guerilla group try to sustain life through planting crops in all available spaces and think their ideal commune can be achieved and aided by a tycoon promising them the earth. Set in New Zealand it does give a lot of background. Not an easy reaf

Birnam Wood is a wonderfully dark and unusual literary thriller. The title is taken from a line in Macbeth, and I’d say there are definitely some Macbeth-inspired details in the plot, although I don’t want to say any more for fear of spoilers, but suffice to say that this could be called a tragedy and a rumination on power. The plot focuses on a small community guerilla gardening group in New Zealand, that is to say a group that gardens on abandoned or unused strips of land, without the legal authority to do so. The group in the book is a hodgepodge of characters with a whole raft of political or ideological motivations, slightly chaotic but, as with Lord of the Flies, making up a sort of microcosm of society as a whole, for the drama to play out within. Their idealistic leader Mira goes off without the knowledge of the rest of the group, to see an abandoned farm after a landslide with a view to a more ambitious project that might allow them to break even - but while there she stumbles across a mysterious billionaire who at first frightens her but then offers her an unbelievable deal that, if they accept it, will allow Birnam Wood both to farm the site and to achieve more than their wildest ambitions. While the group votes to accept this offer, it is one that immediately begins to cause rifts and upsets. The billionaire Robert Lemoine, who made his fortune in surveillance drones, also has his own agenda which begins to spiral out of control as a consequence of Birnam Wood being on the scene.
Although this is nothing like Catton’s previous novel The Luninaries, I think it’s a clever concept and I mostly enjoyed it.

My thanks to #NetGalley and Granta for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This sounded intriguing and looking up the significance of Birnam Wood in Shakespeare's MacBeth had me hopeful.

Alas, it really suffered from a head spinning beginning, where it felt like I was sitting at the wrong dinner table and had consumed too much wine to follow the conversation. There was an over abundance of proselytising in the opening pages that almost had me put this down. Some of the characters in the novel share verbose opinions and they were allowed to rant on the page, which may be enthralling for some, but they were like an ambush to this reader.

I persevered (a characteristic I now associate with Catton's work) and the novel becomes a kind of cat and mouse, eco-warrior-techno suspense story, set in NZ's South Island, in 2017.

Birnam Wood is a gardening collective, a group of people doing gently rebellious work, by planting sustainable gardens in places where they don't have permission. There is a rivalrous friendship between the founder Mira and her flatmate, sidekick Shelley, who we learn early on has a desire to undermine her friend.

When a past member Tony turns up looking for Mira, the focus of the novel changes and becomes more character and action oriented. Embarrassing himself at the group's six weekly 'hui' (meeting), he maintains a low profile, until he has an idea for an investigative journalism scoop he thinks is going to make his career.

Mira hears about a farm up for sale, that has been cut off due to a landslide and thinks it might be a good location for their next project, she decides to scout the location for suitability.

She is unaware that someone else has an idea for the property, with a very different agenda, Lemoine is an American tech mogul billionaire looking to build a bolt hole in an isolated location in New Zealand. Their paths cross and it seems they might be able to coexist, despite the risk of compromising the groups ideals.

The farm, nestled up against a national park, was inherited by Jill Darvish; her husband Owen, a self-made pest-control business man has just been knighted for services to conservation, though he is unsure exactly why.

Everyone pursues their agenda - unaware of being under the watchful eye of the man with the money, while another with few resources, pieces together the larger picture of a damaging conspiracy.

Catton excels at mining the introspective psychological depths of her characters intentions, behaviours and motivations and once the plot moves to the farm, the pace picks up and it becomes a more engaging read.

I was expecting great things of this but was disappointed. Billed as an eco-thriller it addresses a lot of current concerns: surveillance, rampant capitalism, the environment. To me, it falls a little between two stools. It purports to be literary fiction and much of the book delves into the motivations and back story of the characters but actually, it is very much a plot-led and cause-driven book. The first two thirds was slow with too much exposition and too many characters holding forth on their political viewpoint. Each character was described in a huge amount of detail but lacked warmth and humanity. If you like a thriller, I suspect you will find the first two sections too slow. But if you are into character-led books, as I am, you will find that the story arc is driven more by the needs of the plot than the characters. The Shakespeare reference is intriguing but ultimately adds little. Having said all that, it did remind me of Barbara Kingsolver, AM Homes and, more recently, Lessons in Chemistry. It has a lot to say, it shines a light on greed, big business and the environment and there are plenty of quotable lines and some beautiful observations fit for a Booker prize winner (there was a lovely passage about, of all things, a jigsaw puzzle). Even I raced through the last third of the book which was pure thriller with a textbook baddie (almost too textbook) and a political message. I predict that this will be very much a marmite book and, although I didn't enjoy it, I can see that it will be popular.

Birnam Wood refers to the wood that moves in Macbeth that signals his end. It’s the name of a left wing gardening collective that somehow gets involved with a drone-building billionaire, despite that not being exactly aligned with their ideals. The book compares the ingenue vibe of the collective with the hidden intent of the billionaire, always having you wondering who will triumph in the end.

Besides the excellent plot, the book also brings faithfully the angst and self-doubt of the middle-class left-wing, not only driving their actions but also leaving them uncertain what to think.

Wow, if you thought The Luminaries was about rather boring people being boring then this new novel from Eleanor Catton might be just what you need as the antidote! It is fast paced, argumentative and topical with a plot that raises a lot more than vegetables!

Vegetables do feature, however. Mira Bunting and Shelley Noakes are the leading lights in a small guerrilla organisation whose members grow vegetables on private land. It is not exactly a revolutionary party but it symbolises the value of land rights and when the team invade an estate close to a national park in New Zealand, which belongs to the well-established Darvish family, the trouble starts. It turns out that new money, in the form of the unscrupulous billionaire Robert Lemoine, has an option on the land and is mining it for the precious minerals which feed new technology.

You could argue that no-one in this land grab saga behaves well. Mira, the well-meaning hippie, is groomed and compromised by Lemoine, the old money Darvishes see only cash rather than heritage, and Lemoine only sees what his profits can be. It’s the interplay between these forces against the landscape of New Zealand which drives the plot and makes this such a readable novel. There’s a lot of conversation but it is relevant and avoids being preachy, and in the dramatic and unexpected climax to the book nobody comes out of it well.

It’s a good read with lots to talk about concerning how we treat the landscape and, for much of the time, simply ravage it for our own interests.

Birnam Wood pits a group of guerilla gardeners against a billionaire in a New Zealand national park. Mira Bunting is the de facto leader of the Birnam Wood group, who cultivate unused gardens and public spaces with food which they sell or donate.

She has scoped out a property in a national park which she thinks will be deserted after seeing media reports about its owner. However, when she arrives, she encounters billionaire Robert Lemoine, who is apparently buying the property with a view to building an escape bunker.

However, Lemoine has (even) more sinister motives, and he decides to allow Birnam Wood to use the land, neglecting to mention that he hasn’t signed off on the purchase, both because he thinks it will be a smokescreen, and because he finds it amusing.

Meanwhile the Birnam Wood members have all kinds of internal dramas of their own. Mira’s friend and collaborator, Shelley Noakes, wants to leave the group and the home they share, but hasn’t got up the courage to tell her. The man who is in love with Mira, Tony Gallo, has returned from living abroad, but hasn’t let Mira know he’s back. The owners of the land think they have got one over on the billionaire by using his name to leverage their own interests.

The group move to the national park to begin cultivating the property. Tony, still estranged from Mira and hoping to find a purpose, thinks he might move from blogger to investigative journalist. He digs deeper on Lemoine and, without telling the group, travels to the national park to unravel what he's really up to. And from there the misunderstandings build.

Everyone in Birnam Wood is basically good, (apart from the billionaire, of course he’s bad, and yet strangely attractive to some of the Birnam Wood members). However, they are each engaging in small acts of deception for selfish or petty or self-righteous reasons. This leads to consequences which are comical but ultimately devastating.

The characterisation is brilliant. There is great satirisation of the Birnam Wood group, but it’s done from a place of affection. As someone who has sat in draughty halls going through the democratic processes of progressive groups, I cringed knowingly at the endless digressions and delays that characterise the smallest decision, and the way interpersonal dynamics can sway the room.

Catton also captures the paradoxes in such projects. Shelley is a clever administrator who sees that the group could have a business model as a non-profit, while Mira, who is the most ideologically pure, is also doggedly entrepreneurial and willing to break the rules for her own ends.

As someone who reads a lot of crime fiction, I often feel I know where a story is going, but a few pages from the end of Birnam Wood I still had no idea what was about to happen. The ending manages to be surprising, fitting and pleasingly ironic.
*
I received a copy of Birnam Wood from the publisher via NetGalley.

I found this novel really interesting and I was gripped until the end, which sadly didn't land as well for me, although it did give me unpleasant dreams and so probably achieved the intended effect. The novel as a whole reminded me of some of Jonathan Franzen's later work and the theme is certainly a timely one. I enjoyed the alternating viewpoints and the characters are really well drawn. Despite my misgivings over the ending I'd recommend it and I'm sure it will do well - thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

It’s been 10 years since Eleanor Catton’s last novel, the doorstep sized “The Luminaries”, scooped the Booker Prize breaking both longest novel and youngest winning author records. This book marks the long-awaited return for this New Zealand author and has a very different feel from her last highly-celebrated nineteenth century set work.
We are in modern New Zealand. Birnham Wood is the name of a group of radical horticulturalists, a no profit organisation who carry out guerrilla gardening, planting crops in areas which do not belong to them. An area called Korawai (fictional) cordoned off due to a landslip offers a great potential opportunity. The land belongs to the newly knighted pest control expect Owen Darvish, awarded for services to conservation but he is in the middle of secret dealings with an American billionaire. The Birnham Wood group get caught in the middle in what can loosely be described as an eco-thriller.
One thing I remembered about Eleanor Catton’s work is that she likes long sentences which slowed me down last time round but here it all becomes more and more readable as the plot advances. I felt with “The Luminaries” that I was missing out on something allegorical I couldn’t quite pick up on- here things seem more straightforward- it’s a state of the nation environmental novel with leanings towards thriller genre writing where the lines between the goodies and baddies are blurred and moral boundaries are crossed.
Despite the involving plot the main strength for me is (as in her last book) the relationship between characters, particularly Mira and Shelley, the two leading lights of Birnham Wood- Mira, inspirational, starting off enthralled by the prospect of new action for the group, Shelley, more practical, feeling disillusionment creeping in. There’s great tension between these two friends which is convincing. I’m not sure how I felt about the ending which wasn’t what I was expecting. This is another strong title from Eleanor Catton, with less lofty ambitions than “The Luminaries”. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years to read more from her.
Birnham Wood will be published by Granta in the UK on 2nd March. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

I do hope that this is on this year's Booker - a novel about guerilla gardeners that turn over a lot of compost and struggle with irrigation is definitely needed! I love the Macbeth theme (without needing to know too much) and have enjoyed reading the other reviews for extra insight plus the early newspaper reviews. I think this is one of those books that will be dissected and theorised and is a brilliant take on the struggle of left wing politics trying to find balance in a capitalist society. Bit gutted about the ending but I understand!

What an intriguing premise and so skilfully accomplished by Catton. I found the shifting identification of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and the witches utterly compelling. Part thriller, part ecological commentary, Catton maintains the balance and at no point does one element of the storyline dominate. As one would expect from a Booker prize winner, the narrative is tightly controlled and the pacing is perfection. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and cannot wait for publication so I can press it into the hands of customers.

4.5 rounded up

After finishing reading [book:Birnam Wood|60784757] a few days ago I attended a (virtual) event with the author through The Portobello Bookshop in Edinburgh which has informed some of my review.

Catton stated that she began the book during the political upheavals of 2016, terror of the rapidly oncoming future. She had re-read Macbeth at the time and felt it had relevance to the political moment - and realised how much it seemed to be a play about the certainty we can feel about the future, and the seductivity of feeling like we know what's going to happen. She suddenly had the idea that she could write a polyphonic novel which would dramatise a political problem through the characters. Each was a plausible candidate for Macbeth, even though none of them identified as such: each has a certainty about the future which is their ultimate downfall, Lady Macbeth figure out their side who was collateral to their ambition, witches and a Birnam Wood.

Read Elliot Higgins' novel, We Are Bellingcat, which was an inspiration: realised that everything the witches tell Macbeth was effectively open source information (like in this novel). Seemed to Catton that people were approaching their political attitudes in a similar way.

The author also stated that she knew at the outset that she wanted the book to be satire, but that she didn't want it to be a straight adaptation of Macbeth, adding that you don't need to be overly familiar with the source text. She wanted to examine the impasse many left wing organisations find themselves at at a certain point: do we shut ourselves off and remain pure or sell out to some degree - and maybe have a greater impact. People on the left are divided, depending on what the issue is.

Wanted the book to speak to the New Zealand national obsession with property and the generational injustice of this obsession. New Zealand has no capital gains tax, which surprises many because it's seen as a progressive place - but it has been famously hospitable to the ultra rich. Catton wanted to animate the conversations people are having face to face through the novel.

It's a pet peeve of the author where you have an inkling of how much characters use social media but how it's entirely cut out, so the book is honest about this and the surveillance the characters conduct on one another is that which we (almost) all do day-to-day.

In Macbeth the plotting allows the reader to have a periscope into the future, which is mimicked in the book: a character will know something about another which gives them power over them.

No spoilers! But the ending was borrowed from Jane Austen's novels (including her adaptation of Emma for the screen).

Researched psychopaths a lot writing the book - wanted the billionaire to have some similarities to this - and realised algorithms have similar traits to them.

On being a woman in public life: we have tacitly agreed that women have to pay a higher price for this position, but the author doesn't think that this is acceptable and it is reflective that the polarisation that happens online is pushing people further towards ugliness; that its not a reflection of who we are but a distortion of this.

The author didn't want to write a bleak book, but the ending is a result of all the character's actions to that point: if some of the actions hadn't happened then the ending could have been averted.

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After sitting with my thoughts on [author:Eleanor Catton|2093764]'s third novel for a few days I've decided to round my rating up. The book is a brilliant accomplishment: it is incredibly clever and has plenty of intelligent things to say about contemporary society and politics but is highly readable at the same time. Highly recommended!

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Publication date: 2 March 2023
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⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Publications for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand's South Island, presenting an opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But they hadn't figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place.
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I liked the premise of an "eco thriller" about a guerilla gardening group and I appreciated the conversations about environmental activism vs. predatory capitalism.
And who doesn't love a Shakespearean reference?
Objectively, this is a very well-written novel but it dragged so much for two-thirds of the book. Good grief, I was slogging away at it for days!

I'd read through almost 300 pages by the time the action picked up, and I had lost all interest in what was happening at that point. This being said, I did like the very ending (it won't be for everyone,) which happened ridiculously fast over the space of about 6 pages - mercifully short, but jarring compared to the pace of the rest of the book.

Most of the characters were pretentious and mildly unlikeable, which was fine as I never mind that, but I'm not a fan of a moustache-twirling villain - it's so cliché. I almost expected them to sit in a black armchair, stroking a white cat while saying "Good evening, Mr Bond, I've been expecting you."'

I really wish this story had been better paced because it had the potential to be great.
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I was worried about this book for a number of reasons - firstly a book about a gardening collective - didn't sound that exciting. I haven't read The Luminaries (yet - it's been on my physical TBR shelf for years!) and I was a bit concerned by reviews of that book - people either love it or hate it. I had also heard that some sentences were really long (!) and, I have to say, at the start of Birnam Wood I did find the prose rather impenetrable, but only for 20 pages or so. Once I was hooked, I was completely hooked. As for the gardening collective being boring - definitely not the case. As some reviews have stated, this feels like a thriller, albeit a very intelligent one.

I liked that all of the characters' motivations (whether political or personal) were revealed gradually throughout the book, lending a more non-linear approach than introducing all of the cast all at once.

However.... that ending! I can't decide if I loved it or hated it. This was most definitely a 5 star book until that point so, if I loved it, it stays 5 stars but if I hated it, it drops a star. Even after stewing over it for some time I'm still no nearer to a decision, so that probably means I should give it 5 stars, if only for the sheer audacity of it!