In a literary marketplace that sometimes seems oversupplied with novels about brittle intellectuals feeling alienated from their emotions, or twentysomethings grinding axes about their exes, there is the wonder of Eleanor Catton: a novelist of lavish technical gifts who addresses herself to the world, broadly and richly conceived.
Catton’s first novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal, was a small miracle. Leaping acrobatically between fictional and metafictional modes, it tells the story of a secondary-school scandal (male teacher, female student) restaged by trainees at a local drama school. There is something almost Brechtian about the way it shocks you out of familiar fictional comfort zones, and something almost Wildean in the way it lobs its arch perceptions, like glittering little hand grenades, at all sorts of social and artistic pieties.
Catton’s second novel, 2013’s The Luminaries, was a large miracle (it won her the Booker). Running to 821 pages, and set among the gold fields of 1860s New Zealand, The Luminaries is structured around two highly artificial conceits. At one level it spins an intricate pastiche-Victorian mystery revolving around gold, opium and changed identities. At another, its structure follows elaborate astrological rules – a prefatory “Character Chart” notes which characters are “Stellar” and which “Planetary”, and so forth. It is brilliant; a virtuoso performance. But, like most virtuoso performances, it does leave you with the nagging suspicion that virtuosity itself is the point.
Take the novel’s characters, each one carefully painted but nonetheless in thrall to Catton’s great determining structures. The luminaries have personalities but not really that much in the way of life. Catton’s marvellously imagined 19th-century world revolves, and the astrologically directed people go about their tricksy business, but it is difficult not to feel that the machinery underneath it all is the real star of the show. As with certain CGI blockbusters, you marvel at the spectacle and wonder about the vision.
Birnam Wood, Catton’s third novel, raises the question of vision once again. Technically speaking, it’s another virtuoso performance: elaborately plotted, richly conceived, enormously readable. It might seem like cavilling to suggest that what it lacks is an original or surprising sense of our riven world. But without this kind of vision – without insight that reaches beyond good and evil – you risk creating only a superbly polished mirror, one that shows us the world as we already know it.
Literary novels, as opposed to the sort of thriller that pitches goodies against baddies without much moral shading, ideally do more than this. And, in fairness, Catton’s publisher is calling Birnam Wood “a gripping psychological thriller”. Political thriller might be more accurate, since it is really about the schemas and deadlocks of our contemporary politics. Birnam Wood – the forest that moves to Dunsinane Hill to herald the fall of Macbeth – is the name chosen, semi-ironically, by an “activist collective” based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Birnam Wood’s founder, Mira Bunting, hopes for “nothing less than radical, widespread, and lasting social change”; her group’s contribution to this change takes the form of guerrilla gardening projects, reclaiming waste public and private land to grow food crops.
Is Mira Macbeth? She might be; she enters into a deal with the novel’s villain, billionaire Robert Lemoine, a Peter Thiel-resembling “doomsteader” who seems to be buying up a tract of rural New Zealand so he can build a luxury bunker and ride out the apocalypse. Then again, Lemoine himself might be Macbeth. His doomsteading project, we quickly learn, is a front. Secretly, he is extracting rare-earth minerals from Korowai national park. He toys with Mira and invests in Birnam Wood largely for the hell of it – because he is, as the novel exhaustively, and at points hilariously, makes clear, a total psychopath. Birnam Wood moves its operations to Lemoine’s doomsteader tract. Will this herald his fall?
It’s hippies versus billionaires: a scenario full of comic potential, of course. To spike the mixture, Catton throws in a righteous young aspiring journalist, Tony Gallo, and a recently knighted New Zealand business maven, Sir Owen Darvish, and his loving wife, Lady Darvish (as with Sir Owen’s fictional predecessor, Sir William Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, “The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly”).
The first half of the novel, setting all this up, is hugely entertaining. Catton, you think, can do anything fiction requires: she can write funny social satire; she can stage a convincingly self-defeating fight among leftist radicals; she can notice “the hash of oily streaks and fingerprints” on a locked phone screen. You keep waiting for her to do something astonishing with her setup – to give us a novel that doesn’t just crash dishevelled goodies (Birnam Wood) into a suave baddie (Robert Lemoine).
But instead of ushering us into a world of surprising insights, Birnam Wood relies – no spoilers – on a finely spun web of misunderstandings and coincidences to drive its increasingly thrillerish second half. The fictional craftsmanship is above reproach. But it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed that such a beautifully built novel just tells us the same old, same old: billionaires bad! Leftwing radicals good, if sometimes misguided and hapless!
Then again, Birnam Wood does efficiently dramatise a specifically contemporary pessimism: its theme is our collective despair about the locked social geology that prevents meaningful action on climate change. It’s an important subject. And maybe we should expect our schematically unequal world to produce schematic fiction – stories about goodies and baddies, poor people and billionaires, peasants and kings. Catton is not wrong; she is certainly showing us the world we know. But our culture is already rife with calls for moral simplicity. Isn’t it the duty of the literary novel to go deeper?
• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton is published by Granta (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
