A decade later, Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton returns with ‘Birnam Wood’

Ten years ago, Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to win the prestigious Booker Prize, earning it for “The Luminaries,” her second novel.

In the years since, the New Zealander, who now lives in England, wrote screenplays (including “Emma”), got married and had a child. But it took years before she felt ready to write another book.

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“I did feel a lot of uncertainty after winning the prize,” Catton, 37, said in a recent video interview. “I worried that people would not be reliable about telling me if something I wrote was no good. After a prize like that, you become a commodity, so anything you write will make people money. That’s selling my publishers short, but I was wary of launching into something and getting it published and then hating myself for it.”

She hasn’t disappeared from the limelight, though. In 2015, Catton generated media controversy at home when she slammed the then-current leaders of New Zealand as greedy, uncaring about culture and willing to see the planet destroyed, and last month criticized the country’s outgoing prime minister for failing to quell income inequality.

Now she’s back with “Birnam Wood,” an ambitious book that is part social satire and part psychological thriller that builds toward an explosive climax. It also owes a debt to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” in which the forest of Birnam Wood plays an important part.

Mira and Shelley are struggling to keep Birnam Wood, their guerilla eco-friendly gardening cooperative (and their faltering friendship) afloat when Mira finds a potential lifesaver in an American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who admires her willingness to break the law to achieve her goals. But Lemoine, who has been exploiting a wealthy New Zealand couple, Jill and Owen Darvish, for his own selfish ends, should not be trusted. Pointing that out — but all too angrily — is Tony, a co-founder of Birnam Wood, who has just returned after years away. 

The destinies of the six characters are on a collision course and, given that looming reference to “Macbeth,” you can bet that this is not a story where all’s well that ends well.

The book is an attack on greed and capitalism and a cry in the wilderness about the climate crisis yet Catton also savages those on her side politically: Tony, the character whose words most echo Catton’s political statements, comes across as an obnoxious egomaniac. 

“New Zealand as a country has been incredibly hospitable to wealthy people, who are often quite sinister figures,” Catton says, “and the Darvishes knew from the beginning that Robert was a bad guy but it doesn’t matter because they wanted to bask vicariously in his fame.”

 “The environmental damage caused by the lifestyles of the ultrarich so dwarfs the environmental damage done by you and I,” she adds, “but there’s a way that strident environmentalism can veer into misanthropy and treat human beings as hopeless polluting machines and destroyers of worlds and the whole point of human life should be to minimize everything in every way. I can’t believe that.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are consumed by greed and ambition that causes them to compromise any morals. Was that a driving force for you in shaping the characters?

The quality I thought most about when I was thinking about how I wanted to use “Macbeth” in the book is the quality of certainty. The sense of having certainty about a future outcome — Macbeth hears these prophesies and becomes so convinced he knows exactly how things will turn out that his creative mind shuts down and he fails to see how these prophecies could be interpreted differently. 

I was interested in how my characters’ certainties and convictions lead them into blindness. Each one has a fatal blindness — there’s some part of the plot they overlook because of their certainty. 

Q. That certainty leads to impatience and taking shortcuts without thinking things through. 

That’s probably a reflection of the terror I feel about accelerated social change. The book is set in 2017 but I wrote most of it from lockdown onwards and so much had changed in such a short time. I think social media has done that.

Q. You’ve likened social media algorithms to fictional villains. Robert Lemoine never means what he says; he is feeding people what they want to hear and getting people to bend toward his will.

The algorithm flatters you; it sees who it thinks you are and will give you the answers it thinks you want. It’s making us less and less tolerant because we’re so used to these frictionless encounters with the world. We’re not coming up against real differences. 

So much of the formation of ideas ideally comes out of conversation, hearing how someone responds to the phrasing or comes up with a counterargument. That kind of living negotiation of what we think and feel is so important but on social media you’re not in a room with anybody so you can just blurt something out and it will stay in a vacuum without those emotional negotiations and accommodations, where you learn from the mistakes and inarticulacies and offenses you cause in the moment. 

Q. Robert is the clear villain but everyone else is deeply flawed and complicit as the final conflict looms. 

People would automatically assume my sympathies lay more strongly with the younger people, which in a lot of ways, they do. But I wanted this to be a book where nobody thought they were the bad guy and everybody was a plausible contender for the role of Macbeth but none of them, except perhaps Robert, would see themselves that way. 

We often approach political difference these days from our own polarized perspective where we know who the good guys and bad guys are and we want some sort of poetic justice to prevail. My ambition was always to have a Shakespearean ending but I wanted to keep the reader guessing about who would survive. 

Q. Could you relate to each character’s flaws and ambitions?

I wanted to give everybody lines or experiences that I had sympathy for at certain points even if I wouldn’t back them wholeheartedly. 

I have a lot of affection for the kind of New Zealand couple the Darvishes are, but there is this exasperation that is felt among my generation — I was born in 1985 — about the complacent propertied class, particularly because they are our parents so we can’t fully despise them because we love them. 

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Tony feels trapped in adolescence by the economic structures there, which is true for millennials. It’s massive news for most people my age if they manage to buy a house in New Zealand. That’s kind of crazy. There’s a sense that they have not been allowed to have a stake in this world they’re going to inherit.

A lot of what Tony says about politics is smart but he says them in the wrong way and loses people. I definitely empathize with him on that. He leaps to conclusions and runs away with himself. 

There is an arrogance in Mira and she really does meet her match in Lemoine, and she’s more like him than she’d admit, with a kind of haughtiness and coldness. But also Mira and Shelley are not honest about their feelings. It’s as simple as that. I was hoping to set up these relationships that had the ingredients to be these meaningful lifelong friendships – or with Tony and Mira a romantic relationship – but the people just weren’t quite up to the task. It wasn’t possible because they chose not to be brave. 

I don’t want the book to seem nihilistic — the chance to choose right was there, it just happened that the characters didn’t take it.