I’m reading Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood right now, which follows an NZ leftist gardening collective that improbably allies itself with a secretive American tech billionaire. It’s very gripping and full of incredible character descriptions—one of the most exciting novels I’ve read lately.

One of the reasons it’s so exciting, I think, is that the characters have meaningful, believable conflicts with each other—and a lot of internal conflict, too!

We’re first introduced to Mira Bunting, the charismatic founder of the collective, and her disdain for a wealthy local environmentalist named Owen Darvish:

It annoyed her, almost as a matter of principle, that anyone of this man’s age, race, gender, wealth, and associated privilege should have used his power – allegedly – for good, should have built his business – allegedly – up from the ground, from nothing, and should possess – allegedly – the very kind of rural authenticity that she herself most envied and pursued…Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. But because this was not a conscious habit, she experienced only a vague feeling of righteous defiance as, unable to dismiss Owen Darvish, she told herself instead that she disliked him.

Mira’s best friend is Shelley Noakes, but their friendship is an intense combination of admiration and dissatisfaction:

She had sought out Mira’s friendship with a fervour that approached infatuation, transforming herself, though she would not realise this until years later, into a more perfect image of the person that Mira had told her that she already was: more benighted, more repressed, and more continually in conflict with a mother whose every utterance, she came to discover, incarnated no less an enemy than the spectre of late capitalism itself. Cast virtually since birth in the role of the family peacemaker, and praised throughout her adolescence for having cost her parents not a single night of sleep, 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 relationships with others, but her private judgments of herself.

We also meet characters outside the collective—like Owen Darvish, the wealthy environmentalist that Mira dislikes. Owen has a mutually beneficial business partnership with an American tech billionaire named Robert Lemoine, but he’s quietly seething about Lemoine as well:

Sir Owen Darvish had never felt more acutely conscious of his nationality than he did when he was with Lemoine…he wanted desperately to see the man cut down to size – and in this, he felt even more acutely Kiwi. He was long accustomed to regarding his country as an automatic underdog, as a righteous, plucky, decent, and fundamentally good-natured contender, unfairly disadvantaged, in any instance of unflattering international comparison, by its small population, its short history, and its geographical remoteness from the great power centres of the world. A habit of defensive self-exception masked a deep fear of his nation’s insignificance…All of this lent itself quite naturally to an anti-American sentiment; and as he could not help but view Lemoine’s colossal wealth and confidence in metonymic terms, he’d felt, ever since he’d met the man, an almost moral longing to defeat him.

And (there really are so many interesting characters in the novel!) we also meet Mira’s former situationship, Tony Gallo, who’s determined to stop Mira from accepting Lemoine’s money. When that fails, he decides to conduct a covert investigation into the billionaire:

He’d been trying to atone somehow for what had happened at the [collective], to prove to himself that he was not just yet another Marxist intellectual cliché, not just yet another armchair critic with soft hands and smug opinions, who theorised about the working class while never having done a day of drudge work in his life. Tony was very proud to be well read, and had often railed against the defensive anti-intellectualism that defined his country’s culture, but he had nevertheless recognised in himself, at times, a deep desire to perform a kind of excessive rugged practicality in compensation for his bookishness, submitting himself to physical privations, testing his strength and his endurance well beyond what was called for, and devising circuitous home-made solutions to problems that could be solved much more easily, and often more cheaply, by paying someone else to fix them. It hadn’t been until he’d gone abroad that he’d been able to identify this trait as itself peculiarly Kiwi, reflecting a broader attitude held among his countrymen that to do a thing with effort was always more respectable than to have it done with ease.

Also, thank you

for pointing me to this book! I’m ⅓ of the way through and so invested in what will happen…