Fran Magazine: Issue #54

Brendan Magazine on Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood

You’re reading Fran Magazine, a weekly(ish) culture blog by Fran Hoepfner usually but special guests sometimes. This issue is for free subscribers, but consider telling a friend to join in the fun.

Housekeeping

I forgot to share two pieces from the past week and change in the Sunday Dispatch, so allow me to clutter the regular issue with those now. Here’s me on the third season of Party Down for Polygon which people seem to be enjoying but I didn’t, oh well, and here’s me on the Oscars for Interview Magazine before they happened. My thoughts on the actual Oscars that did happen? There’s no paywall great enough for that.

Housekeeping Part Two: Brendan Magazine

Today’s Fran Magazine is by writer and longtime oomf Brendan Boyle. Brendan is one of the hosts of the only good Succession podcast RoyCast — do you remember that Succession is back on Sunday? — and a regular contributor at Cinema Scope. When Brendan reached out to write about Eleanor Catton’s latest, I looked over with profound guilt at my still-unread copy of The Luminaries that Blythe lent me. That’s my problem, though, not yours. Brendan makes a great case for her latest, which makes me want to go back and read the lot of them. Enjoy!

Don’t Look Now: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Although most rewarding relationships with novelists are retroactive, if a reader is lucky they find their contemporaries. Some voices arrive fully formed and serve as constants in the life of a reader, while others evolve more gradually, each book an opportunity to track the development of a sensibility. For me, Eleanor Catton occupies the latter category; it’s been almost a decade since I read her debut The Rehearsal on the recommendation of a friend, and I cherished that novel’s short, sharp shocks. There is both a special thrill and a fondness in discovering that a young writer not only has talent — and, crucially, that the industry seems to have marked them for special significance, ensuring an opportunity to write more — but that the aspects of fiction that interest them are the same ones that interest you.

Catton wrote The Rehearsal at 23, as a thesis project at the Victoria University of Wellington, and the book addresses themes of both pedagogy and creativity — art and the structures created to facilitate it — while teasing out the story of a student named Stanley at an elite acting conservatory (ominously dubbed ‘The Institute’) who incorporates a sex abuse scandal at Abbey Grange, a nearby girls’ school into his own capstone production. The early mark of Catton’s technical ability was The Rehearsal’s use of theatrical devices. The novel has a difficult relationship with chronology; its twin narratives move on alternate timelines, with the Abbey Grange events unfolding in a linear fashion and the scenes at the Institute moving ambiguously between Stanley’s experiences, remembrances and recreations. Chapters begin by naming characters but go on to suggest that they are not themselves, but the actors playing them, who may or may not be other named characters within the narrative. The effect is a novel that takes place in a black box, where identities slip between characters and plots are re-enacted before they properly begin. The central conceit of rehearsal expands out to include the experiences of puberty and young adulthood, momentous passages in every person’s life, in turn mystified and coveted by adults the further they recede into memory.

Catton’s knack for narrative structure and catharsis does not rely on emotional directness, and the cold, slightly distant quality that also distinguishes her latest novel Birnam Wood is echoed in her new author photo, which depicts her unsmiling face atop the turned-up collar of a winter coat. Her novels, which move between a number of viewpoint characters, have the kind of detailed architecture that requires a close attention to find the human emotions within. At the height of her powers, as in the final lines of The Rehearsal that reveal a plot previously hidden in plain sight like a magic trick, this architecture deepens and intensifies feelings that are often mysterious to the characters held in their thrall. When I think of The Rehearsal I don't think of other literary works but of Atom Egoyan's film Exotica, which similarly begins with a cryptic scenario and methodically peels back layers of manipulation and self-deceit. 

catton herself; cred: macmillan

Catton took a break from novel writing after the storm of acclaim that greeted The Luminaries, her 2013 sophomore effort that won the Booker prize and made her a literary celebrity, one of the foremost in her native New Zealand. That book presented a sprawling ensemble of characters drawn together by the 19th century West Coast Gold Rush in New Zealand and a mysterious chain of events, including the disappearance of one man and the unexplained death of another possessing a large fortune in gold. In addition, some characters correspond to signs of the zodiac and others to planetary objects, while each section of the book is roughly half the length of the one preceding it. (I am fondest of the long opening section in which many of the characters get to know each other and establish the plot, its overlapping dialogue and crackling atmosphere recalling nothing so much as McCabe & Mrs. Miller.) It is a hugely impressive novel that I admire more than love, and I think that Catton had some of its more rapturous reviews in mind when she wrote this passage in Birnam Wood:

"In Shelley's time at university, she had contributed a regular book review to the English department's student magazine, and whenever she had run out of time before the deadline, or whenever the book in question had been too difficult or too politically contentious for her to know how to describe her own response to it not only truthfully, but responsibly as well, she had always taken refuge in excessive praise. People were always quick to criticise an act of criticism, and anybody could dismiss as lazy what professed to be lukewarm, but nobody tended to ask any questions of a gush."

It would be unfair to say that the only thing to do with a novel as self-evidently prodigious as The Luminaries was to give it the Booker. But Catton did, in the end, reveal that the Swiss watch machinations of her plot concealed a much smaller and simpler one: a love story between a young man and a young woman. The book was written in the first years of Catton's relationship with poet Steven Toussaint, now her husband, and I have always thought of it as a literary polymath's counter-intuitive way of writing a simple love poem; in part, this lens allows me to find the novel endearing rather than disappointing, a baroque structure smaller on the inside than it appears from without. 

Birnam Wood returns to some of The Rehearsal’s chillier terrain and to the concept of manipulation, downshifting slightly from the complexity of The Luminaries to more satisfying ends. Moving between viewpoint characters like tabs in a browser, the novel draws out the links between left-wing activist Mira and her resentful sidekick Shelley, the leaders of a New Zealand horticultural collective cheekily named with the Macbeth reference of the novel’s title, a past comrade returned from abroad named Tony, and the Mephistophelean Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire moonlighting as a doomsday prepper. Lemoine capitalizes on a chance encounter with Mira — snooping around the abandoned farmland he’s secretly purchased in the fictional Korowai region — to offer Birnam Wood some funding and an opportunity for long-term institutional support, diverting her attention while also using the group as ideological cover for his true intentions: pillaging Korowai for its unrealized deposits of rare-earth minerals, a heist that would make Lemoine “by several orders of magnitude, the richest person who had ever lived.”

Catton’s characters are blurry and featureless, rarely described physically, none moreso than Lemoine, an arch-bastard and chameleonic manipulator who may as well be money incarnate. How a reader feels about the novel will likely correlate with their feelings about Tony (full name Anthony Gallo, email handle gallos.humour@gmail.com), the most recognizable of Catton’s satirical types, described by Shelley at one point as “doing the whole mansplainy, Berniebro-type thing.” Guilt-ridden by two highly Millennial experiences — an episode of public shaming for an article he wrote about poverty and violence in Mexico, and an ambiguous, drunken sexual encounter with Mira years before — Tony moves through the narrative with disruptive force, at one point engaging with a similarly strident female comrade named Amber in a drawn-out argument about identity politics that brings the narrative to a complete halt. 

This ten-page exchange has a clanging, rehearsed tenor but that doesn’t make it untrue; monologuing past each other in slogan-inflected screeds is the discursive style of the day. In reworking Macbeth for the present moment, Catton’s also thought about the way that Internet-poisoned minds (does Tony have Poster’s Disease?) replicate the superstitions of earlier eras. Mira craves both the affirmation and the judgment (and, hence, absolution) of the collective, while Tony’s galaxy-brain, conspiratorial thinking both allows him to see traps that others can’t and blinds him to specific avenues of escape. The tragic hero, classically speaking, must have a fatal flaw that they themselves are blind to; the paradox of Catton’s characters and the activists in particular is how they can miss the big picture while remaining hyper-sensitive both to the flaws of others and to their own perceived obligation to self-critique. 

Although some readers may choose the Tony-Amber fracas, or some other point during the novel’s methodical midsection to hurl the book aside with great force, Catton’s satire is less scornful than it appears. That, for example, Shelley is considering quitting the group at the novel’s outset doesn’t mean that the characters are insincere in their ideals: activists and reformers experience burnout all the time, echoed by the surprise resignation of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern months before the book’s publication. Catton further suggests that Birnam Wood has set its own utopian project up to fail; during the argument with Amber, Shelley does a panicked inventory of the group’s scarce non-white members:

“...And that was to say nothing of all the dozens of volunteers who were Asian and Pasifika – and Māori, too – surely there was someone present who was Māori? Wincing, Shelley looked around the room again, scanning all the faces, and caught the eye of someone on the far side of the ellipsis who was doing the exact same thing. They both flushed and quickly turned away.”

The novel’s characters are constantly making decisions based on flawed assumptions about the people around them, a process of algorithmic sorting that makes goals like solidarity all the more difficult. At one point, Tony observes of a disappointing date that “he couldn’t quite shake the sense that she had formed an opinion about him that she doubted she was going to have to change.” Lemoine, for his part, uses the dizzying array of resources at his disposal to spy on Birnam Wood and his deceptively middle-class hosts, the landowners  Lady Jill and Sir Owen Darvish, placing himself in the position of the all-seeing eye in the sky. The billionaire’s motivation seems at times like a force of weather, until Catton teases out a tantalizing childhood backstory of abandonment by parents working for the CIA in Cambodia after the 1970 coup d’etat. Effectively, Lemoine wants to assert his dominance over the imperial state by using Korowai’s deposits to purchase a controlling interest in the U.S. trade war with China, a megalomaniacal scheme that might make him the tech world’s one genuinely visionary plutocrat: if, that is, he could control for all the variables.

Contra The Luminaries, there’s nothing endearing about Birnam Wood or the bleakness of its finale. Kevin Power’s review in The Guardian scolded the “moral simplicity” of the characterizations — confoundingly taking at face value the notion that the activists allying themselves with a billionaire are unambiguously the good guys — and asked “Isn’t it the duty of the literary novel to go deeper?” Whether one finds in Catton’s critique of the left a crypto-conservatism or not, given the themes that the novel addresses – surveillance states, co-option of left-wing movements, cascading climate catastrophes – only a drip or a pedant could begrudge her her pessimism, and Power’s critique is typical of the snobbery that emerges whenever a genius applies their gifts to genre. 

In interviews, Catton has described screenwriting as her vacation from novels, adapting The Luminaries to a BBC miniseries and Jane Austen for 2020’s Emma. She’s cited TV dramas like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad (sometimes called “MacMeth”) as favorites in the past, but the series I thought of as the full shape of her conceit came into view was The Shield, a never-since-equalled feat of classical tragedy wrought into a contemporary form. As in that series and in great films, like the montage of missed omens that closes Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, there are moments from Birnam Wood that linger like afterimages, scenes of sudden catastrophe and moments of mis- or failed communication between characters that Catton returns to from multiple perspectives.

It’s difficult to describe what makes Birnam Wood such a satisfying expression of Catton’s talent without describing (and sapping the force from) its ending — suffice to say that readers should keep in mind not only that Macbeth is a tragedy but what sort of tragedy it is, even as Catton spends a full two-thirds of her novel laying track for the helter-skelter downhill slide of its endgame. These days I find myself craving tragedies, and while I share Catton’s dim outlook about the future this isn’t the same thing as despair, just as stories with bad outcomes don’t necessarily equal easy cynicism. Tragedy’s enriching as well as cathartic, because a narrative composed of wrong choices reasserts, after all, that those choices exist and life still screams with possibility. A well-crafted tale of woe, like Catton's, provides a whole series of windows into alternative realities: windows that the characters slam shut one by one.