Environmental campaigners and ego-tripping capitalists clash in Eleanor Catton’s Birnham Wood. It sounded promising but it’s largely a promise unfulfilled.

Birnam Wood — the portable forest that heralds the fall of Macbeth — is the name of an “activist collective” based in Christchurch, New Zealand. They’re guerrilla gardeners in essence; taking over waste public land and neglected private plots to grow food crops. Its founder and driving force, Mira Bunting, views this borderline illegal activity as a means to achieve radical, widespread, and lasting social change.

Though their ambitions are lofty, the group has really undertaken only small-scale projects so far. But then comes the day Mira hears about a large swathe of farmland near Thorndike, on the edge of Korowai national park. It’s been cut off by a landslide and is likely to remain untouched for months, making it the ideal place for the Birnam Wood collective to plant a garden. In time it will become, Mira envisages, a showcase project that will bring Birnam Wood to nationwide attention and bring donations rolling in.

Someone else has their eye on this land however. Enter the novel’s villain in chief; one Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and boss of a drone manufacturer. Where Mira envisages row upon row of carrots and kale, beets and potatoes, he anticipates a huge, luxury bunker where he can ride out the inevitable apocalypse. Or so he says.

In fact his bunker plan is just a front for a large-scale operation to extract rare-earth minerals from Korowai national park. He’ll command the global market as a result and make himself even more billions. Birnam Wood is the fly in the ointment; he just doesn’t want a bunch of people roaming around and potentially seeing things he wants to keep hidden. So he tries to buy them off with a promise of an investment bigger than they could ever imagine possible.

A Question of Principles

It’s a chance in a lifetime — with Lemoine’s funding (and with the possibility of more to come) they’d be able to pay themselves salaries and expand nationwide. While if they reject it, they’re never going to be more than a small group that few people know about. But — and for some members of the group this is a huge but — accepting the money means compromising their values since he represents everything they hate about capitalism and money.

Catton has a hilarious scene early in the novel when the group members hear about the funding. They’re so earnest these people and have clearly swallowed the cliche dictionary. “I don’t think intersectionality is the answer to the problem,” one of them proclaims after a long rant about consumerism, political agency and paradigms.

They’re highly principled when it comes to sticking to structured agendas and rules about who can speak when. Yet they carefully ignore the fact that to grow their crops, they steal water and power from nearby dwellings and take any tools that look unused.

Things Fall Apart

So far so good I thought. But then it all slowly fell apart. Burnam Wood started off as a about eco warriors faced with a question of integrity but as we got deeper into the plot it degenerated into a thriller. The whole plot revolves around one issue — the need for Lemoine to keep his real project secret. He’s at risk on all sides.

There’s a Birnam Wood member who abhors the group’s decision to get into bed with a billionaire. Tony who fancies himself as journalist — senses there’s something sniffy going on so has headed to Thorndike alone to spy on the operation.

There’s a risk that the real owners of the land, Sir Owen Darvish and his wife, will return to the farm unannounced and start asking awkward questions. Not just about the rows of vegetables that they didn’t plant but about the security tower and fencing around part of the land.

And then there’s Myra and her closest ally Shelley. Lemoine spins them several yarns to keep them from prying too much; each version of his story becoming more and more incredible.

So it’s essentially a cat and mouse kind of plot no more, no less which was disappointing. There was so much room for further exploration about ambition and principles. Instead we had a basic story sexed up by using the hi-tech world of drone technology, video surveillance and phone hacking but all the drones in the world can’t disguise some fundamental weaknesses in the novel. Chief of which is the character of Lemoine.

He’s presented as an all out baddie, a man who lies and manipulates people to achieve his aims. He’s as confident in his superiority and invincibility as he is about the expendability of everyone else. There’s no subtlety to his character at all; no weaknesses to make him seem human in any way. He’s as one-dimensional as the villains beloved of the James Bond movies.

The Macbeth Connection

People who’ve read Eleanor Catton’s previous novel The Luminaries, will know that she likes to use metaphors, allusions and metafictional elements in her narrative. I suspect that Birnam Wood has many references to the play Macbeth that I simply failed to spot.

There’s a direct reference of course in the name of the environmental collective. Just as Macbeth is undefeated until the forest of Birnam moves to his castle, Lemoine operates undetected until the Birnam Wood group moves to Thorndike. The camouflage used to hide the soldiers’ advance in Macbeth has correlations too with the steps taken by several of the novel’s characters to hide their true activities. Lemoine’s ambition and feeling of invincibility echo those of Macbeth, both leading to their demise. Talking of endings, there’s a similar body count at the end of both pieces of fiction.

I didn’t spot any candidates for the witches though nor a Lady Macbeth figure. But then, we’re probably not meant to see the novel as a direct mirror for the play.