“Birnam Wood,” by Eleanor Catton, was published in 2023. I picked up my copy in 2024, and it took me approximately two years to get into it. I started the book multiple times, but just couldn’t get past the dense prose that is apparently Catton’s specialty. This time I stuck with it, and I’m so very glad I did. This book is fantastic. It won’t be for everyone, and you really do have to tough it out for a bit, but it’s absolutely worth it. Once the plot accelerates, it does so at a break-neck speed all the way to the end.
Birnam Wood, named after the famous woods from Macbeth, is a guerilla gardening group in Christchurch, New Zealand. This means that the collective cultivates food crops where they’ll go unnoticed; in abandoned construction sites, on the sides of roads, or neglected yards; every place land is being wasted instead of being used to feed the people. All of their gardening materials are either gleaned from recycling and garbage bins, donated, or occasionally obtained using the five-finger-discount. And the food grown is shared among the collective, sold at farmers markets, and donated to local food banks.
When a landslide in the Korowai Pass presents the group with an opportunity to farm a large, abandoned sheep station, their de-facto leader (they’re mostly anarchists), Mira, goes to check it out. While there, she meets billionaire businessman and super creepy “human,” Robert Lemoine, who proposes they both use the land, albeit for very disparate purposes. And let me tell you, the way that Catton writes Lemoine honestly makes this book worth reading all on its own. Catton has a very dry, matter-of-fact way of presenting her characters and while it can be overwhelming first, it’s very effective and turned out to be one of the things I enjoyed most. Especially her presentation of the “billionaire class.”
I don’t read a lot of eco-thrillers or political thrillers, so I’m not sure how it holds up in those categories. But, as a mystery and a non-specific thriller, it’s very, very good. In fact, it’s as good as billionaires are bad, so you know, very good.
Rating: 5 stars
CBR18 Bingo Circle: “Sheep” because much of the book, and the action, takes place on an old sheep station in New Zealand
