Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood

"Birnam Wood was defined in carefully apolitical language as a grassroots community initiative that planted sustainable organic gardens in neglected spaces and featured a commitment to help those in need."

But that's not all it is.

Mira Bunting is the founder and main figure of Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand. Four years ago, the emphasis was on the guerrilla: anti-capitalist, rebellious. Now most of their vegetable plots are planted with the agreement of the owners, and the produce is shared out.

Part of the reason for the practicality is Shelley Noakes. Shelley rather worships Mira, but also is beginning to feel used, and at the very start of the novel she decides to sleep with Tony Gallos, Mira's ex-one-night-stand as a way to assert her independence. Tony's just appeared on the scene after teaching in Mexico for four years, and Shelley knows perfectly well Mira and Tony have unresolved issues.

Meanwhile there's been an earthquake in the Korowai National Park that killed five people and blocked a major road. This means that an old farm at 1606 Korowai Pass Road is now isolated. It's owned by Owen Darvish and his wife Lucy, and he's just been knighted for services to conservation even though he's the owner of a pest control company. (One of the things he kills is invasive species.) Mira thinks here is the grand coup that Birnam Wood needs: guerrilla gardening on the Darvish estate. Birnam Wood will go to Dunsinane. (1606 is likely the year in which Shakespeare's MacBeth was first performed.)

But one other figure has seen possibilities near Korowai National Park; that's Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire. His money is from a drone startup, but he envisions a different sort of financial coup in New Zealand.

That's our major players lined up. The first two-thirds of the novel is getting to know them, individually and in relation to one another; the last third is quite the thriller as their different goals conflict and their unknowing about each other gets resolved. The conflict is political and environmental.

The novel's at times funny. When I saw Eleanor Catton here a couple of months ago, she read from a passage with one of Tony Gallos' rather over-the-top rants. The audience--the book was brand-new at that point, and almost nobody had read it--were first absorbed in Tony's righteous anger, then laughed nervously, then laughed out loud. Catton can pull that sort of thing off. 

Tony's still kind of a hero, even if he only has the vaguest sense of reality, and the book ends with him:

"...so that somebody would see it, so that somebody would notice, so that somebody would care, and as the fire began to blaze and crackle up the ancient trees around him, Tony prayed that somebody would come to put it out."

So a pretty fun novel with some serious themes. I did, however, feel that the American billionaire drifted in from a different sort of novel (or film), likely one involving James Bond. I would also say I still think The Luminaries is the one to read. (Though I haven't read her first, The Rehearsal).

Another book actually from my 20 Books of Summer list!

And, as it turns out, it's my first Big Book of Summer. When I signed up for the challenge, I didn't have a copy of the book in hand and didn't realize, but as it turns out it's 432 pages and so qualifies. I still hope to read a few other monsters. Thanks to Sue and Cathy for hosting!

Sunday Salon (and CCSpin Number Reveal!)

 

Last Week

Posted Chicago poet Keith Preston on 'Reading in Bed As A Fine Art'.

Blogged about Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a book from my Classics Club list.

And signed up for the latest Classics Club spin #33. The spin number is 18,

which means Honoré de Balzac's Cousin Bette for me. A good choice!

Some other books, including The Songs of Kabir, tr. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra:

The mind's a shortchanging

Huckster with a crafty 

Wife and Five

Scoundrel children.
It won't change its ways.

The mind's a knot, says Kabir,

Not easy to untie.

On The Stack

In addition to the Balzac, that's Early Irish Myths and Sagas, the Rae Dalven translation of Cavafy, and a volume of selected David Slavitt poems I'm making my way through.

Bookish

I went to see the Eleanor Catton at the main Toronto Public Library talk about her new book Birnam Wood. Except there's apparently some suspense, so while she read from it, she didn't necessarily talk about it much. Not so long ago she wrote the screenplay for a version of Emma, so she mostly talked (very astutely) about that. She's impressive.

But now I do want to read the book. The Toronto library system bought a hundred copies, but I'm afraid I'm only five hundred on the list, so it will be a while...

I was going to post the video of the talk, but it doesn't seem to be available yet, though the library usually does post them here. I've also got tickets for Rebecca Makkai in May.

Eleanor Catton was born in Canada and lived here until she was six. (Her father was a grad student at the University of Western Ontario.) The Luminaries won the Canadian Governor General's award for fiction, as well as the Booker. The interviewer tried to absorb Catton into the Canadian borg, a thing which has been tried before and which I knew from some interview I read earlier, she politely resists. But based on her vowels, she's definitely a New Zealander, which you could check for yourself, if I could post the video... reflict, attintion, togither. 😉 

Chocolate Pots-de-créme, all gone now sadly...

How was your week?

The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries won the 2013 Booker prize. So, you know, you probably don't need me to say nice things about it. But I will anyway... 😉

It's set in 1866, the time of the gold rush in Hokitika, New Zealand, with some flashbacks to a year or so earlier. A dozen men, mostly white, but with one Maori and two Chinese, discover events that seem to implicate them in crimes or diminish their public reputation; it looks like a malign conspiracy, but could any conspiracy be so far-reaching? They decide to meet quietly to discuss, pool their knowledge, and see if they can determine what happened. A thirteenth man, Walter Moody, a young lawyer, happens upon their assembly by accident, and then leads the investigation.

The prose is extravagant, but the pacing is still superb: it's clear to me that Catton is a devoted reader of mysteries: twelve men determining the actions of a villain (if there is one) suggests a jury as well as a certain Agatha Christie novel you may have heard of...; at one point Walter Moody suggests what better place to hide a body than in a coffin (paging Ellery Queen!); and a mention of one red herring (Oh, Ms. Sayers!) made me check to see if that was an anachronism in 1866. (It's not.)

But at the same time Catton writes with the personable omniscient voice of a Victorian like Thackeray:

"Let the man speak for himself!" Nilssen snapped. "What's going on?" 

We shall omit Mannering's answer to this question, which was both inaccurate and inflammatory; we shall omit, also, the ensuing discussion, during which Mannering and Nilssen discovered that their purpose in journeying to Chinatown was one and the same, and Frost, who could intuit quite plainly that the commission merchant was holding him in some suspicion over the sale of the Wells estate, maintained a rather sullen silence. The clarifications took some time,...

I found it an engaging voice and a compelling read, and funny as well. But it also has real darkness to it, too: Catton does not soft-pedal the casual sexism and especially racism that would have been all too common at that time; nor, unlike say in Dickens, does she particularly fix things up at the end. Racist acts in particular have no repercussions, alas, a thing all too true to the time and place, I'm sure.

It begins with an astrological chart, and the plot, according to Catton's afterword, is actually partly determined by the horoscopes she cast. Now that part is very un-Victorian, and rather pomo-ish, something like Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies. I'm afraid all that went over my head, though I didn't really mind. I read most of it while off the grid, with no internet access. I'm an Aries, and that's about the extent of my astrological knowledge.

I did find the second half, the unwinding and explaining of what the 'conspiracy' was a bit slower than the first half; there weren't quite enough revelations there, but it didn't matter: I was already completely hooked...

One of my #20booksofsummer, and here's the summer-y location where I was when I read it...