In his great critical work The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode wrote about the end-directedness of fiction, the way that novels rehearse and forestall their endings – a process he called peripeteia. One thing he doesn’t discuss in that book is what happens when an ending entirely alters your understanding of the text. There are numerous examples of tricksy plot twists – think Fingersmith or Fight Club – but I’m not sure I’ve read a novel whose ending so brilliantly and brutally changes our perception of what has gone before as Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s follow-up to her Booker-winning The Luminaries.
For nine-tenths of its 400 pages, Birnam Wood comes across as a Kiwi Jonathan Franzen – a smart, satirical novel about the clash between a gardening collective and a scheming tech billionaire. There are numerous Franzen tropes here – countercultural/capitalist discord; the striving for ideological purity; the relentless and vampiric march of big business; environmental crisis. There’s even a rare bird – here it’s an orange-fronted parakeet. Birnam Wood is like a Franzen greatest hits album until its glorious, apocalyptic final pages enlarge and complicate our understanding of its message.
