Read “real fiction” Nart, they say. “You’ll love it” they say. Pass.
Plot: Anarchist, socialist, sometimes illicit gardeners Birnam Wood are fighting for a better future with fiery leader Mira at the helm and her long suffering second Shelley. Yes, like in Macbeth, so you probably know what’s coming. Unfortunately, given that they are a bunch of law breaking anarchist socialists, they can barely keep their operation running, let alone have wide reaching influence. Mira is determined to find a way to break through though, and finds it in a fatal landslide in New Zealand’s South Island that closed the Korowai Pass, creating a perfect opportunity to run a larger scale operation in one of the empty residences on the other side of the pass. There is someone already there though, right-wing tech billionaire Robert, who is already arranging to buy the land for his own purposes. Only he’s into the gardening scheme, so maybe they team up?? Shenanigans ensure.
Here’s my problem with “real literature”. For all the shit that genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, and especially romance and mystery get, “real literature” is much more likely to feel like it’s been written as a cynical way to make a buck rather than create something meaningful. They are more likely to read as banal, uninventive, and full of dare I say smugness at its supposed superiority?
There was this conspiracy theory that was very popular a few years ago in my circles that Michael Bay was not actually a bad director, he’d gone to Juliard after all, but that his entire career is performance art trolling. Decades spent raising the stakes on how expensive and stupid his movies are and the empty headed crowds flocking to it anyway. This was before we allowed people to like things. I thought a lot about Michael Bay reading this book. It’s like it followed a checklist of “Things Serious Literature Has” and just ticked them off one by one.
Exclusively unlikeable characters? Check. There’s the long hanging fruit with two dimentional ineffectual lefties and right wing psychos, but Catton also created a happily married couple who are wealthy (but came by that wealth ethically and honestly) and who raised happy, productive children, only to shit on them and turn them into egotistic assholes. The entire population of New Zealand is apparently just a bunch of self-harming dummies obsessed with self-sufficiency to the point of parody. Also if you’re expecting these characters to develop, you are going to be disappointed.
Both over and underwriting? Double check. Maybe 20% of this book is relevant to its own plot, and the filler – pages and pages of character backgrounds and their relationships, is not only boring but where there are ~mysterious~ gaps left wide open for the reader to wonder about are just straight up not resolved. I’m not asking for an answer to the questions left open, I understand the value in leaving some things to the imagination, I’m asking why they were asked in the first place if even the author didn’t care about giving the reader enough information to reach their own answers.
Extremely cynical view of a pressing social ill? Checkaroonie. Everyone’s out for themselves, even the people who claim to want better things for society, and in the end any move you make is doomed, either because of your incompetence/selfishness/dishonesty/lust/etc or because of someone else’s. Yay!
Indeed, the most generous interpretation I have of this book is that its thesis is this is what happens when people suck, so maybe we should suck less, but at least in my view, if that’s the point, it offers no ideas of how we do that. Also there are a few good turns of phrase.
Books like this are why I thought I didn’t like reading and stopped reading for leisure for a decade.