Birnam Wood

Birnam Wood

Mira Bunting founded Birnam Wood several years before the novel begins, with the straightforward premise that unused land is wasted land and that growing food on it without permission is more ethical than leaving it idle. The collective she has built operates on rotating labour, a flat hierarchy in nominal terms (though Mira’s authority within it is not actually flat), and a set of values — anti-capitalist, environmentally committed, practically focused — that distinguish it from both conventional activism and conventional agriculture. They are not trying to make a statement; they are trying to grow food in the gaps of a system that produces plenty of gaps.

Catton’s portrait of the collective is funny and precise in the way that the best satire of progressive organisations always is: she sees the gap between the stated values and the actual social dynamics without reducing the people involved to hypocrites. Mira is genuinely committed to what Birnam Wood is doing and genuinely unable to see the ways in which her leadership of it reproduces the hierarchies it nominally opposes. Shelley, the other central figure of the collective, is Mira’s closest friend and most committed colleague, and also the person whose growing discomfort with certain aspects of Mira’s management is carefully tracked across the novel’s first half. The collective’s other members are less fully drawn but serve their satirical function: the true believers, the hangers-on, the people who joined for social rather than political reasons.

The guerrilla gardening the collective actually does — planting vegetables on unused land, cultivating it, harvesting it, moving on before they are noticed — is depicted with practical specificity. Catton is not interested in romanticising it. The work is physically demanding, logistically complicated, and constantly threatened by discovery. What Birnam Wood is doing is illegal, and the members know it, and the awareness of that illegality is part of the novel’s setup for what happens when they encounter someone with the resources to both protect them from consequence and use that protection as leverage.

Robert Lemoine

Robert Lemoine arrives in New Zealand with the visible profile of a tech billionaire interested in doomsday preparedness: he has bought a large farm in the South Island, ostensibly as a bolthole for the coming civilisational collapse, and his presence in New Zealand has been noticed and debated in the press without producing any great clarity about what he actually wants. He is plausible as a type — Catton has clearly studied the public behaviour and rhetoric of the actual billionaires who have made similar moves — and he is frightening precisely because his plausibility is itself a technique.

What Lemoine actually wants involves the land in ways that go considerably beyond survivalist fantasy, and Catton reveals this gradually, in the same mode of accumulating detail that the thriller elements of the novel deploy. The key to his characterisation is that his power operates through information: he knows things about everyone he encounters, has known them before the encounter begins, and uses this knowledge asymmetrically — withholding what he knows while learning more. His interest in Birnam Wood, when it develops, has the quality of all his interests: it is presented as generosity and experienced as entrapment, and the two are not distinguishable until it is too late.

Catton makes Lemoine frightening rather than cartoonish by giving him a coherent internal logic. He is not a cackling villain; he is a man whose understanding of power is simply more complete than that of the people around him, and who acts on that understanding with total consistency. The novel’s argument is partly that this kind of power — surveillance-based, information-asymmetric, operating behind a rhetorical screen of shared values — is not exceptional but characteristic of how capital operates in the contemporary world, and that the particular vulnerability of progressive movements to it follows from their particular strengths.

The Collision

The novel’s second half accelerates as the thriller mechanics engage. The collision between Birnam Wood and Lemoine moves from apparent mutual benefit to something considerably darker, and Catton handles the escalation with professional precision: the tension is real, the danger is credible, and the irony of a collective built on anti-capitalist principles being destroyed by the most sophisticated available expression of capitalist power is made without heavy underscoring.

The title comes from Macbeth — the prophecy that Macbeth will not be defeated until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, which comes true when the army cuts branches to camouflage their advance. Catton’s use of the allusion is both obvious and exact: Birnam Wood the collective is also a force moving toward something it does not fully understand, and its arrival at Lemoine’s farm has consequences that the members are not equipped to anticipate. The Shakespearean parallel does not determine the plot but it inflects it, adding a dimension of tragic inevitability to what might otherwise be legible as merely bad luck.

What Birnam Wood ultimately argues about environmental activism and surveillance capitalism is not a simple lesson. The collective is not foolish; it is operating in good faith in a situation it lacks the tools to read. Lemoine is not aberrant; he is behaving in ways that the system he operates within makes both rational and rewarding. The collision between them is not a story about idealists versus cynics but about two different relationships to power and information, and the outcome — which Catton delivers without softening — is what happens when those two relationships meet in a context that one side controls completely.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — A sharp and genuinely tense eco-thriller that proves Catton’s formal range extends well beyond the structural games of The Luminaries, with a villain who is frightening because he is completely legible.