“There’s something so joyless about left these days, so forbidding and self-denying. No one having any fun; we are just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough – what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We are all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.”
When I read this fairly early in the book, I was gripped. Being on the internet and being political on the non-right side of things is not always easy. When an ideology becomes an untenable ideal to the point where you get exhausted playing catch up far too often — that? Neither easy nor sustainable. Messy and sometimes frustrating? Yep.
Eleanor Catton’s ‘Birnam Wood’ is a 400-page treat of a gripping eco-thriller. Birnam Wood is an ‘illegal scheme of trespassing and botanical vandalism’, a guerilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. A disaster occurs nearby, and it tables an opportunity for the collective, presenting itself with a billionaire on the side. What then follows is a deep examination of the internet left, climate despair and capitalism. Birnam Wood is an exploration of idealism and the human instinct to survive within the stronghold of the market.
The plot is magnanimous, the humour chilly, and the book enormously readable. The writing is so calculated, aware & observant. This is my first Eleanor Catton book, and I found her to be a mischievous writer, you know? Like she had a ton of fun writing the book. Every page is full of ideas and potential, and Catton hits it out of the park with astute dialogue writing. I’m a fan.
However, while the book cuts open the fault lines and ‘orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left’, I found myself feeling a tad bit disappointed in the end.
For instance, read these bits from the book.
A bit on billionaire survivalism
What is it about billionaires and survivalism? Is it just an arms race? Like, just a possing contest? Or do you all know something that we dont?”
“Both. I mean, of course, it’s a pissing contest. What isn’t?”
“So, what do you know that the rest of us dont?”
“I know how easy it was.”
“How easy what was?”
“All of it. Getting rich. Staying rich. Winning. It was all so easy. I just took what I wanted, and it was mine. And if it was easy for me, then it could be easy for anybody, and that’s a very frightening thought. You reach a certain level, and it’s all exactly the same: it’s all just luck and loopholes and being in the right place at the right time, and compound growth taking care of the rest. That’s why we’re all building barricades. It’s in case the rest of you ever figure out how incredibly easy it was to get to where we are.”
And then a musing about bureaucracy and markets
“What was the cabinet anyway, he thought, but a cabal of millionaire properly tycoons who had spent their time in office beefing up their personal stock portfolios and actively discouraging the populace from turning out to vote?”
These dialogues are distinctly located in the book; they speak of the immense clarity and potential this exploration of easy versus hard, intention versus action has.
But the end of the novel is a bit shocking. The worst part is I’m just still unsure if it’s good shocking. It’s a well-built novel with what feels like a flat landing. The book, throughout its duration, tries to question the binary of thought only to give me a rather easy ending. When a book like this gets an issue like that of the idealism of left acutely well – I guess you also start aspiring for a solution.The gravity of the author’s understanding makes you believe that the ending will blow your mind, but I guess that’s neither possible nor its aim. Lastly, I think my disappointment also comes from my own dichotomy.
Despite all I wrote above, I still love the book. It’s just always such a delight reading someone who can put the most complex and nuanced ideas into plain, simple, short sentences. Birnam Wood does that and builds a niche for itself in many other ways.
This book has been published by Granta Books.
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