Review: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publication Date: March 7th, 2023

Hardcover. 432 pages.

About Birnam Wood:

"Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?"

I've been seeing more and more eco-thrillers pop up these days, and although it's not always a category I'm overly drawn to, I have to say that Eleanor Catton's eco-thriller has really nailed it. If you're looking for compelling characters, thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions, and a plot that just keeps twisting and giving readers more, then you might want to stick around and find out a bit more about Birnam Wood. 

Birnam Wood is actually a very hard book to summarize because it's many different things at once. It's a story about an environmental activist collective–Birnam Wood–whose main act is guerilla gardening, or the planting of various crops in random places, some of which may belong to other people. This collective is not exactly failing, but it's not exactly thriving either and members are looking for ways to grow their reach and impact. It's also a story about different characters going through various life transitions and trying to find their place and their worth in the world, as well as figure out what they really stand for. It's also a much bigger story about politics, the environment, types of government, when it's okay to compromise and when it's not, and what it means to be a human in today's modern age. All this is to say that there's a lot going on in this story, but it's also very readable and fairly easy to follow along with. 

We start off following Mira Bunting and Shelley, both members of Birnam Wood trudging along with their lives, and eventually meet up with Tony Gallo, a former member who has been away studying abroad for the past couple years and is now back in town. We also meet Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire who has a very unique interest in a specific area in New Zealand where Birnam Wood has decided to move in on. Each of these four characters were given vibrant, full-fleshed out personalities and motivations for just about every action they undertake in this story. I really feel as though I got to know each and every character, and I enjoyed watching them navigate all the unique situations that arose throughout the progression of this story. I also particularly liked watching each character interact with one another, as each relationship was very unique, precise, and had some key elements at play that made each one compelling to watch develop. 

There are some big crime/thriller elements in this story, though I wouldn't describe it as being a cut and dry thriller novel. This is more a mix of what I would call a literary style with some heavy mystery elements that really helped to push the plot along. If you've read Catton's The Luminaries, then you might be familiar with this type of mystery mixed with character study and literary style. It works extremely well for the story and I think is what prevents it from ever feeling too slow while also providing reason for the excessive attention to detail present throughout Catton's prose. 

Birnam Wood has all of Catton's trademark style. If I hadn't known this book was written by Eleanor Catton, I would've been able to figure out from page one due to her trademark style. It's a very long-winded, almost stream-of-consciousness writing style that I think fans of Donna Tartt (particularly The Goldfinch) would enjoy, or if you've read Catton's The Luminaries. I was immediately transported into Catton's narrative via her sharp voice and attention to detail. If you like reading narratives that feature a character basically talking nonstop for a long amount of time without a break, or narrative voices that seem to keep rambling on in a way that has a clear train of thought, but is quite long and meandering at times as well, then this is the book for you. 

Overall, I've given Birnam Wood four stars! This was an incredibly engaging story that covered a lot of really interesting discussion points about environmentalism, morality, capitalism, and much more. If you're looking for a longer story to really sink into where you can really get to know characters and consider some interesting topics, then I highly recommend you check this one out. 

*I received a copy of Birnam Wood courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review.*

Buy the book: Amazon | Bookshop.org

The Friday Face-Off: Currently Reading

      

Welcome to The Friday Face-Off, a weekly meme at Books by Proxy. Join us every Friday as we pit cover against cover, and publisher against publisher, to find the best artwork in our literary universe.  You can find a list of upcoming topics at Lynn's Books.

This week's topic is:

Currently Reading

The problem with being productive and trying to get through a lot of 2023 ARCs early is that I don't have very many options of "currently reading" books to share multiple cover versions of because there aren't any yet. But never fear, because I did manage to find one that has three different covers to compare and that is Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton! I've only just started this one so I can't say too much about it yet, but the first thirty pages or so are off to a great start. I really enjoyed Catton's The Luminaries, so I have high hopes. 

2023 US Hardcover | Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2023 Dutch | AmbolAnthos

2023 UK | Granta Books

My choice(s):

The US and UK covers are quite similar outside of a color change, and I have to say that I'm rather fond of the US cover. The Dutch one is nice, but I feel like it makes this seem more like a thriller than it is and throws me off. I like the somewhat chaotic nature of the US edition and how they worked the typography into such a neat style that matches the imagery as well. Which edition do you prefer?

Review: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Little, Brown and Company

Publication Date: August 24th, 2013

Hardcover. 848 pages

About The Luminaries:

"It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. 

 

Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner. "

I'm writing this review only a few hours after finishing The Luminaries, so my thoughts are still fresh, but also still trying to make sense of everything. My immediate thoughts on this book are mainly ones of astonishment and awe at what an intricately drawn and meticulously detailed story and mystery this was.

The Luminaries is a hefty tome and a rather intimidating story to jump into at times. Catton writes in stunning prose that has such a beautiful flow to it, but it is also a, at times, rather dense prose in regards to its content. There is a lot of information given at  many different times, and Catton also puts a lot of detail into her writing and descriptions as well, which makes this a slower-paced story in the beginning. I was pretty hooked from the beginning of the book, but at the same time it was definitely a slow beginning that took me a while to fully find myself immersed and caring about what's happening, especially since the first three-hundred or so pages take place on the same day (this portion is written as characters recount past stories, so there are more things happening than just one day's worth, but we are essentially stuck in the same scene for quite a while). Despite it being slow, the reader is still thrown into a sort of mystery right away that it took me a while to fully understand why it mattered or what the purpose was in telling this story.  

Since there is such a large cast of characters, I'm hesitant to spend too much time listing each one and discussing their roles, so I'll try to do my best to do a more general summary of how the characters were developed. If you're like me at all, you might feel a bit worried when you see that there are twelve characters already mentioned in the summary, and you might feel even more overwhelmed when I tell you that those twelve are not the only ones we follow. However, to ease any worry I will tell you that I somehow had no trouble remembering who each character was and distinguishing them from one another (which was astounding to me, to be honest!). Catton does such a good job of giving each character a unique voice, personality, and role in the story that it's exceptionally easy to follow along and feel interested in following their story. We do follow quite a few different POVs at various points, and I think one aspect of this that was really a strong point was in how deliberately and carefully Catton weaved in each character's POV and scenes. There were times when we would hear from some characters a lot, and then we would focus on some others for a while, and then we would return to some, and then maybe return to others--I know this sounds vague, but I really do appreciate and respect how well Catton juggled so many characters so as to give each one adequate face time in the novel and plot itself. You really can't take out one single character from this book and still have the cohesive novel that has been presented--each character plays a vital and important role at some point in the story.

And this brings me to my next point of discussion, which is the overall plot itself. Never have I wanted to get out a big sheet of paper and plot out every event of the plot with a novel more than I have with The Luminaries. This is a huge story that centers around a few rather minor events, and there is so much that builds up to an understanding of how everything unfolded to lead to each and every last event. The way that Catton slowly unravels each layer of the story is what makes this such a successful mystery, as you always have enough to wonder at, but not enough to make solid connections until she continues peeling back layer after layer, beginning the story with tales of the past, then moving to the present, and slowly returning to the past to provide all the background information needed to understand everything. And as much as I keep calling this story a mystery, it's also simply a stunning and epic tale of peoples' lives during the New Zealand gold rush period in the 1850s. This is not a setting that I often get to read about, and Catton brought it to life so beautifully and in such a way that I would really love to learn more about it.

Lastly, I want to mention the structure of this book from the physical standpoint so that I can highlight how impressed I was with the mathematical meticulousness of the book itself. The number twelve is an important one in this book, and that can be seen with the twelve parts that make up the entirety of the story. Within each part are unnumbered chapters, and the most interesting part about this is that each chapter + part equaled the number thirteen. So, for instance, Part 1 has twelve individual chapters, Part 2 has eleven, and so on and so forth to Part 12 which only has one chapter. Similarly, the size of each part and the chapters within seem to mimic the cycle of a moon from full to new, going from larger sizes to smaller. There are also a few details within the story itself that I can't mention because of spoilers that also have to do with some variant of the number twelve, which I loved discovering. And, of course, there are twelve men that makeup the foundation of the story, each of which corresponds to a sign, of course, as well, since this book is also very heavily dependent upon star charts and astrology, which was such an interesting detail. I don't know too much past the basics, but I would love to learn more so that I can discover even more hidden details that Catton has surely included. Some people might call some of the structural aspects gimmicky, but I personally really loved them, as they are those little details that I Think make a book stand out even more. 

Overall, I think it's going to be five stars from me for The Luminaries. I felt a little unsure at times while reading this and wondering if I would ever finish, but I was hooked almost constantly throughout and I just really think this is a fantastic story. I listened to some parts near the end on audio and I would highly recommend the audiobook if you prefer those, as the narrator is fantastic at creating voices and accents for each character.

Buy the book: Amazon | IndieBound