“Inspired by ‘Macbeth,’ Climate Change, and the Perils of Social Media, Eleanor Catton Penned a Deeply Compelling Novel” - shondaland

Written By Amy Watt

Published: Mar 24, 2023

In “Birnam Wood,” the award-winning novelist captures the inner workings of an anarchist guerrilla gardening group.

Eleanor Catton has spent much of the last decade writing with the constraints of a television budget in mind, so she was excited to begin her latest novel with a bang. Or more precisely, a landslide.

“As a screenwriter, you’re always being told that you can’t do things because they’re too expensive,” Catton says over a Zoom call from her home in Cambridge, U.K., where she lives with her husband and daughter. “And when I finally got to write this book, I was like, ‘I’m free!’” Without any limitations, Catton was able to write a landslide that killed five people into the opening paragraph of Birnam Wood, her newest novel. “And it was just me being like, ‘Yes! At last, I can write something that a producer isn’t gonna say, ‘We’ve got to cut this, sorry. Can it be one person who dies?’”

Ten years after becoming the youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize with her second novel, The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton has finally released her third book this month. Birnam Wood is billed as an eco-thriller, but that feels too narrow a description once you get into the 400-plus-page novel. It does feature explosions, private planes, poisonous gases, clandestine operations, manslaughter, murder, car crashes, and other forms of devastation: all thriller-y things that would presumably be difficult to film cheaply. But the novel itself is more of a meditation on Catton’s deepest worries than a story told to titillate. And what’s been on her mind? The dangers of ideological purity, radicalism, and incrementalism; social media and surveillance capitalism; and climate change and our persistent inaction when it comes to this world-ending promise.

 
Amy Watt
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