Birnam Wood ★★★★☆
After the whopping success of Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries, the author has confessed to feeling considerable pressure to hit similar heights with her latest offering. And while the two storylines could not be more different, it’s safe to say that, as with The Luminaries, TV (and potentially film) companies will be queuing up to secure the rights to Birnam Wood. This gripping thriller has ‘screen adaptation’ written all over it, flipping easily from page-turning to binge-watching.
Author picture: Murdo MacLeod
Set in 2017, in a fictional national park on New Zealand’s South Island, Birnam Wood has no direct link to Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’ from which its name originates (although the perils of anyone amassing too much power are certainly writ large). Instead, it refers to a guerrilla gardening group that ‘borrows’ and cultivates land around Christchurch to grow fruit and vegetables. When they discover some potentially fertile soil is going to waste five hours’ drive away, in the small town of Thorndike, it seems like an opportunity that’s too good to miss. Especially when American billionaire Robert Lemoine enters the fray, offering to fund the poverty-stricken group.
Catton does an incredible job of commanding our attention; first, by building the novel’s foundations with squabbling and failed romance within the gardening collective, and then by ramping up intrigue once they decamp to Thorndike. If there’s a small irk, it’s the whiff of beard-stroking Bond villain about Lemoine that detracts ever so slightly from the story’s believability.
Otherwise, this tale of environmental do-gooders versus big business, with all the complexities both sides of that political divide bring to the party, feels very on-message. Thrilling plotline aside, Catton is also masterful at description and dialogue, providing enough detail to project images in our mind but never straying into unnecessary exposition. Prepare to push all other concerns aside until you reach the end.