Review: Anthony Domestico on Eleanor Catton

Mar 18

Fun is a serious thing for Eleanor Catton, who won England’s Booker Prize ten years ago with a second novel that was both structurally complex and a legitimate page-turner, something you could include in a grad seminar or read on the beach. (I did the latter and would love to do the former.) In her first novel of 2008, The Rehearsal, an acting student is asked why he wants to give his life to the theater. “I just want to have fun,” he explains. In The Luminaries a wicked character declares, “What fun we shall have this evening!,” before drawing another character’s astrological chart. “No one’s having any fun,” a leftist named Tony complains about other leftists in Catton’s third and latest novel, Birnam Wood. “We’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough—and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that?”

It’s a good question. 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, who wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, 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. Act like a cad long enough and you are a cad; remain “perennially wrapped in the cocoon of [your] own senses” and you’ll become a monster. Catton loves to think in types—“Do you think … that the kind of person who can never say sorry is also the kind of person who can never say thank you?,” someone wonders in Birnam Wood—and her novels are filled with sentences describing what characters tend to do or often think. She finds that humans are consistently good at misreading their own natures and, as any reader of Austen or Eliot knows, there’s nothing more delightful than seeing self-deception laid bare.

Perhaps the purest fun on offer in Catton’s fiction, though, is that of plot. For her, plot is an experiment or dare. You’re the kind of person who can never say sorry? Let’s see how you deal with accidentally causing great pain. The Luminaries, set in the New Zealand gold fields of 1866, featured shipwrecks and forged wills, madams and jailers and opium dealers, all connected by blackmail and murder. “What a convoluted picture it was,” one character archly admits, “and how difficult to see, in its entirety!” Birnam Wood, though more structurally streamlined, is just as plotty. Its premise sounds like a Lee Child-style thriller. (Catton has mentioned being influenced by the Jack Reacher series.) Robert Lemoine, an American who has made billions in drone technology, decides to build an end-of-the-world bunker in New Zealand. The bunker serves as a blind for his real goal: the secret extraction and subsequent multi-trillion-dollar sale of “rare-earth elements” required for everything “from smartphones to precision-guided weapons.”

The bunker is one blind. His investment in an activist gardening collective called Birnam Wood is another. Small in operation (they plant vegetables “without permission on public or unattended lands”), Birnam Wood has big dreams, committed to a vision of “a classless, environmentally sustainable, direct-democratic economy that is both regenerative and responsive to human need.” It might not sound like Lemoine’s thing, and indeed it’s not: Lemoine aims, by allowing the group to garden near the land he is secretly mining, to distract from his sinister doings. He sees the group’s ideals, like the world, as something to be gamed. As he observes, “being a cliché can be very useful”—we don’t look closely at what conforms to type—and he often acts the tech jerk, microdosing acid and rehydrating with an IV drip. But defying expectations can be useful, too. Lemoine prides himself on improvisational genius. “To remain in tactics was the strategy,” he thinks. Consistency is for losers; morality is a mug’s game.

Birnam Wood hopes to use Lemoine as well. The collective’s founder Mira knows that Lemoine’s investment will put the group on more solid financial footing; others believe that an infusion of capital might enable Birnam Wood not just to demand but to effect political and social change. (Catton perfectly captures the squabbles of small communities, with one group dinner a cringe masterpiece.) Tony, who once belonged to the group but has since moved on to the world of internet journalism, stumbles into this story of billionaire malfeasance. At first, he’s furious. But then, he thinks about how reporting it out might make his name: “In his head, Tony saw his byline, imagined himself getting interviewed, heard the intro music for a podcast.” Catton is wonderful on these kinds of moments, when a character’s self-narrative comically runs away with things.

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. There’s an accidental death and a coverup, a safe house and lots of tech-aided chicanery, with Lemoine hacking phones and backdating emails. Then there’s another death, and another. In Catton’s fiction, it’s difficult to stop things—the calcification of character; the consequences of action—once they get started. The novel’s final, hurtling fifty pages are thrilling and dreadful.

Early in Birnam Wood, Catton writes, “Shelley had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable—a fate even more terrible than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationship with others, but her private judgments of herself.” This echoes a passage from The Luminaries, where a very different character has a very similar thought: “He could not bear to know that he was disliked, for to him there was no real difference between being disliked, and being dislikeable; every injury he sustained was an injury to his very selfhood.” 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.

Anthony Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and the book critic for Commonweal. He is the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period.

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