Autumn 2025: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

When Birnam Wood begins to move in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tyrant knows the witches’ prophecy has been fulfilled and his end is near. The rebel forces cut branches from Birnam Wood, effectively camouflaging themselves as they march on Dunsinane to topple Macbeth. These soldiers show that power, however entrenched, can be overthrown when ordinary men move as one. Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood takes up that same name, but in her hands the forest metaphor has soured. Her guerilla gardening collective imagines itself as a force of subversive change, reclaiming land from neglect and capitalist control. Yet when its leader Mira Bunting accepts funding from Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire, and establishes up the collective on land he controls, the forest no longer marches against tyranny. It becomes cover for his illicit drilling operation. The group’s aims and the billionaire’s hidden agenda become fatally intertwined, blurring the line between resistance and complicity. 

Birnam Wood raises pressing questions around the survival of collective resistance in an age of ecological collapse and vast wealth inequality: can activism avoid compromise, or is it always at risk of slipping into complicity with the very systems it seeks to dismantle? 

Eleanor Catton, one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, rose to international fame in 2013 when her novel The Luminaries earned her the Booker Prize at the age of 28, making her the youngest recipient in the award’s history. That book, a sprawling 832-page Victorian-style tale set during New Zealand’s 19th-century West Coast gold rush, showcased her ambition and literary command. A decade later, Catton has shifted her gaze to the present day with Birnam Wood, a sharp, unsettling ecothriller that trades the past’s opium dens and fortune seekers for a tense exploration of climate anxiety, political disillusionment, and generational struggle. Her stylistic choices in Birnam Wood reflect a deepening of literary influences since The Luminaries. After completing that novel, Catton wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. “Austen was almost as big an influence as Macbeth”, Catton says, noting that writing the screenplay for Emma taught her how to shape Birnam Wood as “a dramatic book where the characters made choices and the drama proceeded from those actions”.  

That sense of drama aligns with the novel’s setting: the rugged beauty of New Zealand, presented as a stage on which competing ambitions and anxieties play out, whilst Catton dismantles the myth of the country as a liberal utopia, revealing its environmental fragility and social divides. She was set on writing a novel “satirical in tone” and determined not “to flatter a particular political point of view”, skewering billionaires, boomers, and activists alike. Her satire opposes a culture which, as she puts it, “has a very strong expectation that its artists will flatter the country’s, frankly, quite naïve self-image”. 

Catton’s fiction resonates uncomfortably with fact. The COVID-19 pandemic put New Zealand on the map as a remote and climatically temperate refuge for wealthy Silicon Valley doom preppers. During the border closures, Google co-founder Larry Page was nonetheless able to enter to secure medical care for his child, with his residency application being processed in mere weeks whilst others had waited for months or years. Even more striking was the case of PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, who was granted New Zealand citizenship in secret, despite not fulfilling the standard residency requirements, effectively receiving the ultimate form of what Jonathan Barrett in an essay on Thiel’s case terms “apocalypse insurance”. Birnam Wood’s American billionaire Robert Lemoine could have stepped straight from these headlines, highlighting the realities of elite privilege in times of crisis, where access to safety and survival is less determined by need than by capital and influence. 

Meanwhile, the same billionaires present themselves as climate saviours. Jeff Bezos made New York Times headlines when he pledged 10 billion dollars to his new initiative the Bezos Earth Fund. Conversely, Amazon’s own impact on the environment is growing substantially, with a carbon footprint that puts the company in the top 200 emitters worldwide in CDP North America’s carbon disclosures list. This dual role of destroyer and saviour is exactly the paradox that Catton dramatises in her novel. When Mira confronts Lemoine about the contradiction of prepping obsessively for an apocalypse that his wealth and influence could help prevent, she exposes how these crises entrench elite power: “at some level you must be kind of willing it to happen”. Lemoine counters with chilling sincerity, casting the wealthy as divine figures: “Yes we’re like gods … but Gods can be capricious, Mira. They don’t always do what you want them to. They move in mysterious ways”. 

Catton drives this point home in an interview, remarking: “There’s a sense of almost congratulations in New Zealand about it. Oh, they want to come and live in little old New Zealand, you know? And they’re really rich and famous. It’s almost a point of pride for some people, but it’s so chilling. There’s something incredibly psychopathic about the control that the oligarchs around the world have”. 

Lemoine embodies this oligarchic control, his wealth allowing him to dictate the terms of the group’s survival, turning their vulnerability into a lever for making concessions. His earlier warning to Mira rings eerily true as he successfully dismantles the group from within. Solidarity becomes brittle once his promise of stability appears, and it seems impossible to disentangle resistance from this condition, compromised by the insecurity on which his capital feeds. 

Catton’s tonal shift reflects the precariousness of the group’s existence. Early chapters are filled with satirical edge, where Mira’s ambitious plotting, Tony’s relentless critique, and Lemoine’s polished charm clash in constant witty verbal sparring. Tony Gallo, once a member of the collective and now freelance journalist, emerges as the group’s fiercest critic, scrutinising Lemoine’s every move. Dialogues sparkle with irony, skewering activist jargon and billionaire platitudes alike. Yet as the novel progresses, satire gives way to menace, surveillance intrudes, paranoia builds, and violence erupts. The banter foreshadows brutality, reminding us that compromising with power never remains abstract. What begins as a story of scrappy idealists soon curdles into a narrative of betrayal and collapse, mirroring the tragic trajectory of the collective. Catton’s style insists the notion that resistance entangled with capitalist power does not develop quietly, it implodes violently. 

By refusing to let her novel or characters settle in fixed categories, Catton embodies in form what she dramatises in content: the impossibility of moral purity. She resists the temptation of casting her characters as villains or saints and instead insists on their compromises and contradictions. Mira, for instance, is visionary in her dream of a collective that can reclaim neglected land, but that same restless ambition also drives her to overreach. When Lemoine offers the group funding she justifies her acceptance of what Tony criticises as “blood money” with a rhetoric of capitalist growth “to keep on doing exactly what we’re already doing – but just at a bigger scale, and with a bigger impact” slipping into the money-driven expansive logic of capitalism her movement seeks to resist. 

And while Tony delivers perhaps righteous critique, it’s inseparable from his own vanity and desire for recognition. His insistence on purity is compromised by his own ego, aiming to expose the greed and corruption of late-stage capitalists while still imagining that he might profit from the exposure without himself becoming one of them. The problem with Tony is not that he is right or wrong, but that his truth-telling is always tethered to his self-importance: “I am going to be so fucking famous”. In the end he exemplifies how resistance, when driven by the hunger for recognition, risks producing the very logic it opposes: turning solidarity into a stage of self-branding. 

Catton insists on this moral ambiguity, leaving space for her characters’ choices to shape their paths: “I don’t feel like Birnam Wood is a nihilistic book, because all of the characters make choices, and those choices could have been made a different way. Tiny decisions in this book end up having enormous consequences later on. And to me, that’s an optimistic message. It’s saying that it doesn’t have to be like this. People can take a different road”. 

It is precisely this instability that makes Shelley so dangerous. She ostensibly is the still point around which others circle, keeping Birnam Wood’s daily work afloat, often mediating Mira’s rashness and Tony’s dogmatism. Yet, her neutrality proves anything but safe. Her decision to sleep with Lemoine sharpens this ambiguity: it looks like agency, but reads like capitulation, blurring desire, passivity, and betrayal. What appeared as loyalty becomes dangerous volatility. Shelley’s arc makes clear that neutrality is never neutral: refusal to choose carries consequences, and in her case, those consequences prove catastrophic. 

Bleak yet darkly satirical, Birnam Wood is then not a book of easy heroes or villains. Instead, Catton dissects the myths societies tell about themselves and reveals the compromises, contradictions, and dangers that emerge when ideals collide with power. At once a thriller, a satire, and a moral parable for the age of climate change, Birnam Wood is a novel that refuses flattery, demanding instead that its readers confront uncomfortable truths about complicity and the futures we are building. 

What, then, does Birnam Wood reveal about the fate of activism? Its answer is bleak. Mira’s movement collapses, Tony’s revolution implodes, and the thrillerish second half of the novel culminates in a bloodbath from which no one escapes unscathed. The novel seems to insist that, in an era of ecological collapse and obscene wealth inequality, there are no clean victories. If solidarity is to survive, it must imagine forms not already dependent on the systems it resists. Catton does not offer solutions, but she makes the stakes brutally clear. 

Still, such clarity risks slipping into predictability. However intricate the plotting, the moral feels familiar: billionaires are ruthless, radicals are earnest but flawed, and Tony’s conspiracies proved closer to the truth than anyone had wanted to admit. The novel captures with striking precision a distinctly contemporary pessimism, but in dramatising this, it at times tells us little we do not already know. 

Nevertheless, the sharpness of its twists and the relentlessness of its unravelling continuously tighten the narrative’s grip as it hurtles towards Tony’s kamikaze, a full-blown Shakespearean finale where Catton reminds us that Birnam Wood does move, toppling power only through devastating ruin. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Ruitenberg is currently an MA student in the ‘Literature Today’ program at Utrecht University, with a BA in English language and culture. She is interested in feminist literary criticism and questions of identity, which shaped the focus of her bachelor’s thesis that explored themes of selfhood and transcendence in twentieth-century literature. In her free time, she likes to draw and pretend she’ll finish the ever-growing pile of books on her shelf one day.