The story so far. In 2013, at the age of 27, New Zealand author Eleanor Catton published her second novel The Luminaries, a 19th-century epic that combined a twisty plot (ghost, gold rush, crime-busting) with a high concept. Every movement, meeting and character was determined by the zodiac, and each chapter had precisely half the number of words as the one before.
Three months later, Catton became the youngest ever winner of the Booker Prize for fiction, a title she retains a decade later. “It was extraordinary,” she says now. “It was amazing! Especially because the book was such an experiment, and I had no idea whether I was going to be able to pull it off.”
We are here, however, to talk about Catton’s new book. It’s been a long time coming, and in the meantime some things have changed – for example, Catton lives in Cambridge, England, now, having “come over for my husband’s work in about 2017”. It’s from there that she’s talking to me today, via Zoom in a brightly lit room with an enormous stacked bookcase behind her.
[ Eleanor Catton wins the Booker with The LuminariesOpens in new window ]
What took the new book so long to arrive, I ask? Was she simply enjoying the success of The Luminaries or did she feel pressure – from herself or others – to follow up the Booker win? “No, actually, I did write it quite fast as soon as I was writing it full-time. But a couple of screenwriting projects got greenlit almost immediately after the book had been announced [in 2017]. So I didn’t even start writing it until a couple of years later. It wasn’t until 2020 that I started working on it full time. And then I got pregnant.”
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The new book is called Birnam Wood, a title familiar to those who have read or seen Macbeth: as in the play, here Birnam Wood is “the wood that moves”. It’s a guerrilla gardening project by a group of left-leaning millennial New Zealanders, keen to raise awareness of sustainability – they like to break into property and plant crops. When a landslide isolates a rich man’s farm, it seems like a great opportunity for the group – especially when another even richer man, Robert Lemoine, offers to bankroll them.
The stage is set for lots of conflict between the wealthy capitalist and his new associates in Birnam Wood – but also for internal conflict within the group, who can’t agree, for example, whether it’s respectful or cultural appropriation to change their name to a Maori term or whether polyamory is a capitalist idea. At one point, the book describes Mira, Birnam Wood’s leader, as “a self-mythologising rebel who prefers enemies to rivals”. Does this, I ask, reflect what Catton sees from those on the left, who – on social media at least – often seem more interested in fighting others on the left than attending to a common opponent?
[ Booker Prize 2022: Shehan Karunatilaka wins with The Seven Moons of Maali AlmeidaOpens in new window ]
“Yeah,” she says immediately. “A lot of my wish to write this book came out of my deep unhappiness and dissatisfaction with the state of the left. And not just the contemporary left: the left of the last 80 years has totally failed to mount a credible alternative to these ways of seeing the world that have become so ubiquitous and so hard to defeat. But they’re only made possible by the failures of this so-called opposition. Yes, I have a lot of impatience with that, and sadness about it.”
Birnam Wood has been presented as a thriller – and it is indeed a page-turner, with lots of action and arguments, in particular in the run-up to its appropriately Shakespearean ending – but Catton is keen to emphasise the book’s satirical aspects. “I was very clear from the start of the book that I wanted it to be a satire – but in the Jane Austen sense of not exempting one character as my avatar, who was going to be flattered. I wanted to satirise the whole idea of what it means to be flattered, as we constantly are by the algorithms that [ensure] our opinions are reflected back to us in the best possible light.”
That take-no-prisoners approach means, as Catton suggests, that liberal, left-leaning readers may find people they agree with being mocked, as well the obvious baddie of the piece, Robert Lemoine. He’s an out-and-out villain, using drones to track people, hacking people’s phones, and hiding his true intentions from the Birnam Wood collective. He gets his own time in the narrative spotlight – was it fun to write from the viewpoint of such a dastardly figure?
“Oh yeah, amazing fun,” says Catton, though she quickly qualifies this. “He was difficult to write, actually. I had to psych myself up whenever I was in his sections – it took me longer to get into the swing of them, and when they were over, it took me longer to shake them off.”
It would have been easier, perhaps, just to let him be the cardboard baddie. “I wanted to show that he’s the arch villain of the book. But I [also] wanted to show that we live in a culture that is increasingly psychopathic. Psychopaths are rewarded financially and they’re rewarded with political power, and we treat them with a kind of veneration. We’re so fascinated by what makes psychopaths tick; we’re not as fascinated with how altruists think.”
Robert Lemoine has his own purposes for the farmland Birnam Wood are interested in, but his cover story is that he’s “doomsteading”, that is, building a post-apocalyptic bolthole – which, according to books like Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse, is a real thing that international billionaires are doing in New Zealand.
[ If this is the apocalypse, why are so few of us eating each other’s flesh?Opens in new window ]
“Totally!” says Catton. “And the New Zealand government has been nothing but hospitable! Meanwhile, there’s a chronic housing shortage in New Zealand. People of my generation and even older are totally priced out of buying for the first time.”
That ties in with the book – which is set in 2017 – referring to New Zealand’s perpetual series of right-wing administrations. Since then, of course, Jacinda Ardern and the (left-of-centre) Labour Party have been in power. Did that change things in New Zealand?
“Well, I’ve been away for so much of that, I can only give an outsider’s perspective. I think that much like Barack Obama, she ended up being more of a moderate than anyone would have hoped going in. For example, New Zealand is unusual among developed nations in that it has no capital gains tax at all – so if you’re going to get wealthy in New Zealand, don’t bother with an income. Incomes are for little people! It’s a pretty crazy way to structure an economy. And [Ardern] pledged not to introduce a capital gains tax, and never to do it. And I thought that was a pretty huge betrayal of young people. Inequality is rising in New Zealand. We need bold creative thinking to arrest that, and it didn’t seem that she was able to achieve that. If that was even something she wanted to achieve.”
[ Jacinda Ardern to step down as New Zealand prime ministerOpens in new window ]
And Ardern resigned last month, citing burnout; some have commented on the personal abuse she received during her premiership. “I think it had been awful for her,” agrees Catton. “The venom directed at her, death threats and rape threats. I think it was probably hell. But I fault social media with that. We’ve become used to thinking of places like Twitter as a modern public square – and they have nothing in common with the public square! They’re for-profit environments and have been designed by a very, very small number of people for the benefit of a very, very small number of people. They’re not democratic in the slightest.”
Catton had her own instance of public shaming after the success of The Luminaries. When she criticised the New Zealand government in interviews, an organisation calling itself the Taxpayers’ Union itemised the arts funding she had received over the previous 10 years and called on her to repay it. “It was picked up and run uncritically in a national newspaper,” she says now. “It was a blatant act of intimidation.”
Such a polarised approach, I suggest, might be even more common now. “Of course. And I do think social media is responsible for pushing us and dehumanising us. I think we’re becoming less and less human, the more time we spend on social media. I feel very strongly about it. And one of the things I wanted was for [Birnam Wood] to be a book of presence and a book of conversation, where you had the pleasure of people meeting face to face.” The book is invested in the New Zealand landscape and the connection of its characters to that physical world. “Ultimately,” Catton concludes, “I wanted it to offer an antidote to these featureless spaces where we spend so much of our time.”
Birnam Wood is published by Granta Books on March 2nd
