I have arrived late to the party in reading Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton. I may not provide anything new in this review, therefore, but only my personal reactions to the book.

The book, which borrows its title from the oft-quoted lines from Macbeth, can be seen through the lens of ambition (as in the Shakespeare play) and the tragedy that befalls those consumed by ambition.

Two of the main characters, Mira and Shelley, are the backbone of an idealistic farming organization in New Zealand (Birnham Wood), which aims to plant gardens on neglected and underused plots, then harvest the produce for good. Of the two, Mira is driven by the ambition to make a mark and prove herself (although to whom is not always clear). Shelley, on the other hand, is easily swept up in other people’s ambitions without a strong sense of what she wants out of life. These two are both friends and rivals.

Tony, a former member of the Birnham Wood collective, fancies himself as an anti-capitalist shock-journalist. He wants to transcend his middle-class white privilege and write exposés about other beneficiaries of white privilege. Ambition drives him almost to the point of death in this book.

Added to this mix is Robert, an American tech billionaire who has come to New Zealand to exploit and rape the country. He’s been covertly exploiting a particular patch of rural New Zealand (with the permission of the government, it is implied) that Mira wants Birnham Wood to exploit as well, although Mira’s exploitation is far tamer. Robert’s ambition appears to be to pull off bigger and bigger projects to make more and more money, although he’s already very rich. Robert embodies a particular hollowness of the very rich: men (and they are almost always men) who need to prove that they have more worth than mere billions can provide them.

The narrative is told in third-person from multiple POVs. The reader knows more than the characters about what is happening, which creates tension, particularly in the second half of the book. Unfortunately, the tension is blunted in places by bloated, slow moving prose. The first third of the book consists of long character sketches with much backstory. By the time the story starts to gather momentum, we know a lot about the characters. This gives the conflict between characters a sharpness that can be enjoyable to savor. However, it is achieved at the expense of a slow beginning.

I almost stopped reading the book after the first fifty or sixty pages because of the slow pace as well as the relentless whiny narcissism of the main characters.

The plot has been well thought out, setting the characters on trajectories that guarantee they will collide. In the latter half, the pace picks up and the book has the feeling of a thriller. There are car crashes, hired goons with guns, surveillance drones galore, and Tony bushwhacking through the brush having transformed into a guerilla journalist. The end comes quickly, perhaps too quickly in comparison with the slowness of the early parts of the book.

I appreciate the author’s willingness to dive deeply into the characters, which makes for rich interactions between them. I wanted the character sketches to be more focused, however. There are so, so many details about the main characters, often delivered in pages of exposition, that it becomes difficult to know which details are important and which are not. In a different sort of book, the psychology of the characters might be revealed more through their direct actions and dialogue. That does not seem to be Catton’s style, and it is not useful for me to wish that an author would write in a style that better suits me.

Overall, I enjoyed the psychological thriller aspect of the novel. Sadly, I did not care about the characters very much. The lack of connection to the characters and the possible futility of the ending left me dissatisfied when I closed the book.

I might go re-read The Luminaries (a book I enjoyed very much) or Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac, a more satisfying eco-thriller.