It has been a decade since Eleanor Catton published The Luminaries, which made her the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize – she was 28 at the time. That intricate book was a historical mystery, its complex structure drawing on theories of Western astrology. On the surface her new novel, a pacy, contemporary thriller, would appear very different, and yet both books address the exploitation of New Zealand, where Catton grew up, for its natural resources, spinning their stories around the question of who gets to claim what lies beneath stolen land.
In Shakespeare’s Scottish play, Macduff’s army cut branches from Birnam Wood as they advance towards Macbeth who is holed up in Dunsinane Castle believing himself safe, and that the witches’ prophecy – that he shall never be vanquished “till the Wood of Birnam rise” – will never be fulfilled. In Catton’s novel, Birnam Wood is a group of guerrilla gardeners, idealists who plant hardy perennials and fast-growing annuals “on verges and fence-lines, beside motorway off-ramps, inside demolition sites and on junkyards filled with abandoned cars”. They are led by Mira Bunting, a young woman “uninterested in profit and at the same time obsessed by growth”. They battle to keep afloat and salvation seems to come in the form of Robert Lemoine, a mysterious American billionaire who made his fortune in drone technology and who has bought a plot of land, at the edge of Korowai park, a state-protected area in Canterbury, under which he can dig a bunker. When he catches Mira trespassing, he offers to donate $100,000 to fund the struggling organisation.
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