A big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkey-wreching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot through a Stoppardian sense of humor. The result is thrilling. Birnam Wood nearly made me laugh with pleasure. The whole thing crackles, like hair drawn through a pocket comb ... Catton has felt like the real thing out of the gate. One reason is her way with dialogue. Her characters are almost disastrously candid. They talk the way real people talk, but they’re freer, ruder, funnier. Alongside the wordplay and in-jokes, and the topping of those jokes, unexpected abrasions pile up. You sense the world being thrashed out in front of your eyes ... Another reason is her knowingness — her thinginess. Catton is at home in the physical world, and her details land ... Finally, there is Catton’s generosity, to her characters and to her readers. She turns her men and women around and around in appraisal, allowing the available light to alternately flatter and roast them ... An ardent ecological novel, but it’s not a softheaded one. That’s another reason it’s a rarity.
Takes its title and other cues from the realm of Macbeth, and distributes the responsibility for a downward spiral among its players, though the blame is unevenly laid ... The book begins gaily enough, and the setup sometimes recalls another English writer, Jane Austen ... The issue of climate apocalypse casts a shadow over the text until the end, though it is only directly raised a couple of times. Instead, Catton deftly constructs a political and environmental universe that has broadly capitulated to corruption, where individuals absentmindedly microdose poison each day until they are doomed ... The writing...is action-driven and shares some of the plainness of the thriller genre, and is also presumably a result of Catton’s recent screenwriting experience. I missed the peculiar literary flourishes of her two previous novels ... As the precise nature of the novel’s climax came into view, I found it at first faintly ridiculous, and then, finally, persuasive and devastating.
Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is one of 2023's most sophisticated, stylish and searching literary works, a full-on triumph from a generational talent ... Employs the thriller form to magnificent effect ... Catton writes languid sentences that fold back on themselves amid a lift of conjunctions and prepositional phrases ... But in its scope and execution it moves beyond these novels just as smoothly as Lemoine's plane glides upward.
Whooshingly enjoyable ... A witty literary thriller about the collision between eco-idealism and staggering wealth ... Catton taps into a feeling very much of our moment.
Bold, ambitious ... A grand, chilling thriller tightly bound by inescapable concerns ... Birnam Wood moves at a faster clip with arguably higher stakes. Make no mistake: It’s a book that grips you by the throat until its final paragraph. Catton successfully scorches the earth with her prose ... Little feels certain or safe. The literary novel binds itself with a genre thriller in Catton’s hands ... Free to play with form, Catton winds methodically through the minds of her characters ... I’ll unabashedly state that Birnam Wood is a brash, unforgettable novel.
A sleek contemporary thriller ... Catton writes with a satiric edge that leaves no survivors. In fact, she’s most incisive when it comes to the members of the Birnam Wood co-op ... Catton has somewhat less success bringing that level of verisimilitude to Lemoine ... But that feels like a minor distraction in a novel that dramatizes political, technical and environmental crises with such delicious wit.
Birnam Wood’s biggest twist is not so much a particular event as the realization that this is a book in which everything that people choose to do matters, albeit not in ways they may have anticipated. Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice, for most of us, is an act of self-definition ... Birnam Wood’s true turns are all carefully set up, as long as you’re focussing on the right details ... Birnam Wood, like all good books, doesn’t supply an answer.
After the splayed-legged reach of Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries, her new follow-up retracts in on itself — not just in size and scope, but in messiness too. The ragged edges are trimmed. The wonderful weirdness is flushed right out ... Catton writes him in big block letters: VILLAIN. And she narrates in a close third-person, explaining motivations down to the atom and shutting off any avenue of curiosity her characters might have about themselves ... Sure, by the end of Birnam Wood there are real, bloody consequences — a muddle of flesh and bone. It’s messy, at last, but not quite the mess a novel needs ... And what’s a critic to do with a melodramatic ending that can’t be spoiled but perfectly encapsulates the novel’s primary flaw? Let’s put it this way: If Birnam Wood were a film...its final minutes would feature a slo-mo crawl, a soaring score, a sacrifice for the greater good. Neat and tidy, as if someone took a stiff broom to the plot and swept out all the delightfully dirty corners.
There are numerous examples of tricksy plot twists...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 ... 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 ... Like a Franzen greatest hits album until its glorious, apocalyptic final pages enlarge and complicate our understanding of its message ... A dark and brilliant novel about the violence and tawdriness of late capitalism. Its ending, though, propels it from a merely very good book into a truly great one.
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 ... The first half of the novel...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 ... 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.
Literary fiction with the propulsive pace of a thriller, a masterful display of omniscient storytelling, a cautionary tale of friendship soured, a shrewd take on environmental activism and the global existentialist threat, and undoubtedly one of the books of the year ... Taut and tightly wound ... Catton takes such hallmarks of the suspense genre and makes them her own in a story that never flags in over 400 pages, buoyed along by the author’s gift for narrative tension and her fluid, elegant prose ... A tense, thrilling story that puts a small cast of highly contemporary characters under extreme pressure to explosive results ... This is an unapologetically political novel, more concerned with the abuses of power of government and elite societies than the navel-gazing of any particular character ... A big, brash cerebral novel of multiple perspectives, a snapshot of the modern world, to paraphrase Macbeth’s witches, where fair is foul and foul is fair.
In many ways Birnam Wood is Catton’s best book yet. The ten-year wait has been more than worth it. Once again, it seems, a total reinvention has taken place ... Catton’s ingenious, intricate yet always lucid storyline is bolstered by formidably competent characterization and crackling dialogue ... I enjoy a good thriller, and this is an excellent one
A tightly plotted thriller enriched with tartly satirical depictions of an assortment of elements that outsiders casually associate with New Zealand ... Almost all of the pieces of Birnam Wood fit together as intricately and operate as pleasingly as Lemoine’s stratagems, with the notable exception of the group’s name, which is never properly explained. Why would such an earnest lefty Kiwi group pick a moniker from a Shakespeare play? ... Here, Catton tips her hand. She has a penchant for schema herself, and with Birnam Wood... she began the project not with a plot but with a chart. Every character is, in his or her way, Macbeth ... If Catton has a weakness as a novelist—and she doesn’t have many—it’s that her fondness for comprehensive patterning is not very novelistic.
With Birnam Wood...it seems Catton no longer feels she needs to show off quite so much. The back cover mentions the words 'thriller' or 'thrilling' four times — insisting, with slightly over-solicitous enthusiasm, that this is a gripping book ... Happily, Birnam Wood is shrewd, serrated and, yes, eventually thrilling ... Catton is an excellent prose stylist with a pleasingly old-fashioned interest in probing the psychology of her characters ... Although it’s not consistently jokey enough to be a black comedy, the novel is backlit by a winning, winking self-awareness ... Many-layered.
Brilliant ... Catton sometimes over-explains the plot, but Birnam Wood is still a powerful portrait of the uncomfortable relationship between capitalism and idealism, and the compromises and trade-offs one might accept in pursuit of a goal. As some of Catton’s characters learn, vaulting ambition can be admirable, but if one o’erleaps and falls, the landing is anything but smooth.
Catton’s filmic novel features vivid characters, not all of them likable, and sharp, sizzling dialogue. Themes in the intricate plot include identity politics, national identity, and exploitation by the super-rich. Birnam Wood is tightly wound and psychologically thrilling, and Catton’s fans and readers new to her powers will savor it to the end.
The first 50 pages are a bit of a slog. Dense with backstory, they feel like throat-clearing from The Luminaries. But don’t be put off. Birnam Wood soon becomes a hold-on-to-your-hat eco-thriller with big, juicy themes and morally conflicted characters who could be in the room with you ... Catton is brilliant at capturing her characters’ desire to make their mark on the world while satirising their pettiest impulses ... Catton is a generous writer with an elastic talent. Her instinct is to give the reader more for their money — more plot, more context, more suspense, more social commentary, more character ... Birnam Wood is a novel that contains multitudes. It’s an ample return on that early promise — and with half the pages.
What kind of fun is to be had when to read the news is to feel, as Tony puts it, 'a wave of fury and despair roll over him.' Should a person even have fun faced with 'degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more'? Catton’s answer is a complicated but passionate yes. Novels are meant to give pleasure, and it’s precisely through this pleasure—through their ironies and set pieces, their feints and revelations—that they do their most serious work. Catton...possesses a traditional understanding of character. Like George Eliot, the nineteenth-century novelist whose moral vision most resembles her own, Catton dramatizes the moral importance of habit and the ill effects of egotism ... Perhaps the purest fun on offer in Catton’s fiction, though, is that of plot. For her, plot is an experiment or dare ... The novel alternates among close third-person perspectives. The reader sees what each blinkered character cannot: everyone is using everyone else; it’s blinds within blinds within blinds. About midway through, these competing schemes intersect and then conflagrate ... All of Catton’s plot maneuverings lead to moments of self-judgment. I thought I was the hero; what if I’m the villain? I thought I saw clearly; what if I’ve been blind? We resist this self-reckoning with all our being. How wonderful that, in Catton’s novels, these hard thoughts prove such irresistible fun.
A tragic eco-thriller ... Catton injects granular details into her depiction of mining’s impact on the land and those who tend to it, and she pulls a taut, suspenseful story from the tangle of vivid characters. Thanks to a convincing backdrop of ecological peril, Catton’s human drama is made even more acute.
Catton is more interested in the ways everyone is cloudy-eyed with their own hubris in different ways. The result is a story that’s suspended on a tightrope just above nihilism, and readers will hold their breath until the last page to see whether Catton will fall ... This blistering look at the horrors of late capitalism manages to also be a wildly fun read.
