Eleanor Catton knows that ecological despair is not the most appealing subject for a novel. Amidst members of the activist gardening group Birnam Wood – the focus of Catton’s new novel of the same name – contemplating the various forms the climate apocalypse might take, one character interjects “We’ll all be so fucking dead. We’ll be on fire”.    

After all, despair can quickly devolve into cynicism – “This conversation is bumming me out… Can we do drugs now please?” – and who wants to read a cynical novel when so much of it exists in our day-to-day lives? And what if that book caricaturizes the very few people who resist cynicism, those few ardent believers in the power of grassroots movements to halt our apocalyptic environmental trajectory?

Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, does all this and yet, it is an affirmation of the enduring value of such literature.  

Catton made her literary debut in 2008 with The Rehearsal, which explores the lives of students at an all-girls’ school and their involvement in a scandalous affair between a music teacher and a student. The Rehearsal was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won the Betty Trask Award in the UK. Even greater acclaim was awarded to Catton for her second novel, The Luminaries, which won her the Booker Prize in 2013, making her the youngest author to win at 28.  

The Luminaries is a historical novel set in nineteenth century New Zealand, Catton’s native country. The story revolves around Walter Moody, who is looking to make his fortune during the gold rush of 1866. Moody becomes entangled in a mysterious web of events involving a group of twelve local men. As he tries to solve a series of interconnected mysteries, the novel delves into themes of fate, astrology, and the consequences of greed.  

Like The Luminaires, Birnam Wood is set in New Zealand and much like its predecessor, is concerned with greed. In Birnam Wood, this greed is articulated within the context of contemporary exploitation of the environment. All of this is personified by Robert Lemoine, the book’s caricature James Bond villain. Catton creates in him the quintessential modern billionaire – a self-aggrandizing psychopath. Lemoine is a billionaire and nothing else.  

At least, that is how Lemoine wants the world to see him. “Being a cliché can be rather useful,” Lemoine asserts, and he carefully constructs a public persona by outwardly “dialing up the billionaire psychology”. “Lemoine loved to present as an enigma,” Catton reveals, to which only he holds the key. This key, in keeping with the Bondian archetype, is a troubled past and a desire to take revenge on those who wronged him, which for Lemoine is a rather large group: “his parents, his grandparents, the army, the government, the CIA”. His capital, then, is proportionate to the size of his vengefulness. 

Lemoine’s wealth, as well as “his mystique, his opacity, his protean curiosity and impenetrable charm – these were not intrinsic aspects of his character, but cultivated acts of vengeance against everyone who had deceived him”. “He had risen to power to spite them,” and, he admits, “it was all so easy. […] it’s all just luck and loopholes and being in the right place at the right time”. “That’s why we’re all building barricades,” Lemoine continues, “It’s in case the rest of you ever figure out how incredibly easy it was for us to get to where we are”. This is the frightening truth, Catton suggests; being a billionaire is not the product of hard work or genius but of luck and exploitation. One need only look at Elon Musk to confirm that there is some truth to this.   

Although Lemoine’s outward persona as a billionaire is a carefully constructed front, the hidden truth of his character – wronged and vengeful – is a cultural given: billionaires are bad. This makes Lemoine a caricature twice over, both in the caricature he constructs of himself and the caricature of the evil billionaire hiding beneath it.   

Catton’s caricaturizing extends to all characters, even the well-intentioned if at times hapless group of climate activists of Birnam Wood, a guerilla gardening collective involved in illegally cultivating crops “along verges and fence lines, beside motorway offramps, inside demolition sites and in junkyards filled with abandoned cars,” to create sustainable food-sources and subvert public opinion on land ownership. 

Mira Bunting, the founder of Birnam Wood – the group’s name alludes to Shakespeare: “Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him” – fervently believes in the group’s mission to generate “radical, widespread and lasting social change,” through its gardening practices. Mira is a charismatic and deeply principled leftist radical, but can, to the frustration of those around her, act as though “the rules that bound the little people were just too tiresome and too ordinary to apply to her”. The allusion to Macbeth is fitting; similar to Lemoine’s self-aggrandizement, Mira too is caught up in her outsized ambitions and ideals, but for only one of them, that flaw will prove to be tragic.   

“There was a kind of safety in abstraction,” Catton suggests, and Mira embodies that sentiment; she is a caricature of the leftist ideologue caught up her own “roving speculative energy,” and blind to “those aspects of mundane existence that could not be posited or wished away”. Nevertheless, her fervor is infectious and her convictions are woozily inspiring.  

For caricatures can do two things: they either reduce a character to its flaws or they endear and charm. Catton manages to capture both, in Lemoine’s vengefulness and Mira’s ideological fervor, respectively.  

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When a landslide closes the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island and the small town of Thorndike is cut off from civilization, leaving a sizeable farm abandoned, Mira is alert to the opportunity that the farm presents to Birnam Wood. She takes a trip to Thorndike to scout the location. Once there, she finds acres of land ready to be cultivated, if it wasn’t for an unnerving encounter with its new owner: Robert Lemoine. Lemoine, in line with his public appearance as a paranoid billionaire, alleges to have bought the farm in order to construct a bunker to keep safe should a global apocalypse arrive.    

Mira is frightened by Lemoine, not just by his demeanor but also by his effect on her. For despite their insurmountable differences – Lemoine is filthy rich, Mira a leftist radical – she is attracted to the billionaire. Even more surprisingly, Lemoine offers the farm and a sizeable cash-infusion to Birnam Wood. Lemoine’s motive remains unclear; perhaps his humanity is seeping through his carefully constructed front, or Mira presents just another puppet for Lemoine to play with. Either way, an apprehensive relationship begins to unfold between them, charged with the tension that their remote positionalities produce. 

This leaves Mira with the dilemma to what degree she can, in good conscience, collaborate with the ‘enemy’– “Like all self-mythologizing rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo” – in order to advance Birnam Wood’s goals. Nevertheless, Mira is anything but immune to the attractions of power and blinded by her dreams for Birnam Wood, she decides to accept Lemoine’s offer. 

Mira is an endearing caricature of the well-intentioned but hapless leftist radical; her ideals are so firm and her personality so moralistic that it clouds her better judgement. Still, Catton is clearly empathetic to Mira, and this empathy is infectious – despite the moral ambiguity of her relationship to Lemoine, one cannot help but root for her.  

But Mira’s personal dilemma over her partnership with Lemoine is only part of the problem. In line with Birnam Wood’s ‘Principles of Unity’, the group is devoutly democratic. This sets up what is the novel’s most accomplished scene; in a soup-kitchen, the members of Birnam Wood meet to discuss the possibility of accepting Lemoine’s offer.

“What are they talking about?” Shelley, Mira’s best friend, asks another member of the group. “Capitalism, I think?” he responds. “Didn’t we already solve that one?” Shelley asks.

The discussion Shelley is witness to is dominated by Tony Gallo. Tony is Mira’s ex-lover; a disillusioned academic with a master’s in “critiquing the anti-humanism of post-structuralist political thought,” who left unexpectedly for Mexico only to be accused by the academic community at large over his essay on language barriers and class difference for “reinforcing harmful stereotypes, of sentimentalizing violence, and of being yet another entitled white man”. Feeling wronged and misunderstood, Tony returns unexpectedly to New-Zealand to attend Birnam Wood’s meeting, having decided to leave academia for a career in journalism.  

Before the meeting has even started, Tony becomes increasingly passionate in a jeremiad on consumerism, market-thinking, individualism, polyamory (“polyamory is so fucking capitalistic”), intersectionality and neoliberalism – in short, he is outraged by every inch of liberal thinking, arguing that all of it is “still inside the paradigm” which they so desperately want to subvert. The reaction by the group is riddled with humor – “Like, is anyone filming this?” – making for a comedic theatre that is probably recognizable to anyone ever involved in self-defeating fights amongst leftist radicals.

When the meeting turns to Lemoine’s offer, Tony is quick to respond: “He’s literally the opposite of everything we stand for. … It’s blood money”. Public opinion amongst the group has shifted away from working in Tony’s favor, however – “You come back after how many years, you completely dominate the conversation, you’re rude and dismissive, you’re eating food that we grew and we cooked for you” – and so when the group moves to vote, the majority is in favor of working with the billionaire, even if only to spite Tony.  

As it turns out, rather expectedly, Lemoine’s wish to use the farm as a doomsteading project is merely a scheme. His supposed interest in the Korowai farm lies actually in the protected nature reserve that neighbors it. Here, Lemoine intends to illegally mine rare-earth minerals to acquire a staggering fortune, at the cost of causing widespread ecological destruction.

At this point, what has thus far been a comedic drama develops into a thriller with a decidedly ecological twist. The dramatic irony is that none of Birnam Wood’s members are aware of Lemoine’s insidious plans. That is, except for the group’s outcast, Tony: “Whatever was going on in Korowai was going on in secret and he, Tony Gallo, Anthony Gallo, was going to be the one to flush it out”.

As an aspiring journalist, Lemoine’s secretive exploitation of the Korowai land offers a promising opportunity to Tony: “This was his story”. Tony is an unlikely hero; feeling misunderstood and underappreciated, he is guided as much by his ‘Berniebro’ ideology as his desire for personal glory. Although Catton caricaturizes Tony’s vanity – “I am going to be so fucking famous” – one cannot help but share in his excitement: “He was part of the story, he was the story. He saw himself on stage, on a podium, collecting an award”.  

While secretly documenting Lemoine’s activities in Korowai, Tony finds himself in a David-and-Goliath story against a power that far exceeds his ability – Lemoine has advanced drone technology as well as a private army at his disposal – but that makes Tony all the more likeable and the story all the more suspenseful. Will one unlikely hero be able to subvert an evil billionaire’s exploitation of the environment?  

Birnam Wood, as a result, offers more than caricatures of the all too familiar performers in our present ecological drama. It stages a conflict between good and evil and looks the painful truth squarely in the eyes: in our current environmental predicament the evil far outweighs the good, both in capital and in power.  

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Tony declares during his tirade at Birnam Wood’s meeting. “As long as we keep thinking like this, we’re stuck with cynicism. There’s nothing else. We’ll never be able to agree or work towards a common goal, and that means the whole project of genuine left-wing politics is fucked.”  

Still, Birnam Wood is not a cynical novel. Exactly in Catton’s unflinching attention to the cynical truth, she captures a sense far more powerful than dread: as long as characters like Mira and Tony believe in their transformative potential despite all evidence to contrary, there is hope.