Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton review - A gripping and incisive literary thriller

Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening collective led by Mira, "aged twenty-nine, a horticulturalist by training". When she learns that a large plot of land on the Korowai peninsula has been privately sold by a well-off local family to American venture capitalist Robert Lemoine, she immediately wants to claim it for her guerrilla portfolio. Alas for Mira, Lemoine's business involves drones, so he is well-equipped to surveil her covert forays on to his land. Once acquainted, however, they enter into an unexpected partnership that deteriorates into a game of cat and mouse as each tries to use the other to advance their own interests.

While Catton retains her penchant for intricate and twisty plots, Birnam Wood eschews the stereotypically postmodern (and astrological) pyrotechnics that characterised her two earlier novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries. While this shift towards traditional realism is a refreshing addition to Catton's oeuvre, this stylistic manoeuvre also marks a more explicit engagement with politics.

While Catton's disaffection with the reigning economic and political order is obvious, she still manages to majestically depict life under late capitalism as a series of cascading disasters. To her credit, Catton's tone never becomes didactic; while her characters do get shouty at times (particularly the activists), the heavy slathering of irony ensures their verbal sparring remains satirical. A significant portion of the novel exudes an atmosphere of absurdity, which is encapsulated in the opening lines:

The Korowai Pass had been closed since the end of the summer, when a spate of shallow earthquakes triggered a landslide that buried a stretch of highway in rubble, killing five, and sending a long-haul transport truck over a precipice where it skimmed a power line, ploughed a channel down the mountainside, and then exploded on a viaduct below.

Her skewering of certain public figures is less subtle but no less enjoyable. In 2015, Catton was unwittingly embroiled in a public stoush with then-Prime Minister John Key after she suggested at the Jaipur Literary Festival that New Zealand was dominated by "neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money hungry politicians who do not care about culture". In retaliation, Key told Television New Zealand that Catton "has no particular great insights into politics" as "she is a fictional writer".

It is hard not to see Key lurking behind the unnamed "moneyed politician" who reinstates chivalric titles because he is "desirous of a knighthood of his own". Which brings us to the novel's salient theme: ambition.

This is a fitting preoccupation for a story that takes its cue from Shakespeare's Macbeth, a figure brought down by his own "vaulting ambition". But don't waste your time trying to work out which of Catton's characters represents Macbeth; as characters' motivations and allegiances shift so often, they can all be read as Macbeth at different points. Ditto for Lady Macbeth; most of the characters have blood on their hands - metaphorically or otherwise.

Indeed, making enemies is a raison d'etre for characters of all political stripes. It is certainly the case for Mira who "preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo".

While the Macbeth connection is a fruitful one, arguably there is a more interesting, if unexpected, comparison to be made with Jane Austen's Emma. Catton wrote the screenplay for the 2020 adaptation of Emma directed by Autumn de Wilde. Austen's influence is clear in Catton's creation of a highly constrained setting centring on the fictional town of Korowai. The circumscribed nature of life in the town, as well its locals' penchant for gossip, is reminiscent of Emma's own village of Highbury. The shenanigans that erupt in the wake of Lemoine's arrival and which drive the plot of Birnam Wood also exhibit the same "deceptive cunning" that the crime writer PD James once ascribed to Austen's meticulous plotting in Emma.

Austen's novel also provides a thematic foil to Macbeth's concern with ambition. The drama of Emma arises from the central character's blindness to her own desires, and misreading of others' motivations. In Birnam Wood, such blindness is often wilful, but it is also a product of the deception with which every character operates.

As Emma proclaims late in the novel when she realises that she has been duped: "What has it been but a system of hypocrisy and deceit, - espionage, and treachery?"

All in all, an apt description of Catton's dazzling novel.