I finally got tempted by Eleanor Catton ‘s most recent book , “ Birnam Wood”, published in 2023, around ten years after The Luminaries which earned her the “Booker” for a book of more than eight hundred pages, which I didn’t like very much. Still, I  read it all, forcing myself to read about ten pages before falling asleep and even today, it’s a bad memory. So I hesitated before starting to read her latest publication, but the fact that this time there were only four hundred and some pages helped me take the plunge and I also was attracted to the topic . This time Catton wrote a  psychological or political thriller that draws attention to the impasses of nowadays politics.

The first protagonist is Birnam Wood, an activist collective based in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its founder, Mira Bunting , dreams of radical, widespread and lasting social change; To achieve this, the members of Birnam Wood engage in a sort of gardening guerrilla, reclaiming unused public and private land for cultivation. The other protagonist of  the novel, Robert Lemoine, is an Americain billionaire. He has officially come to New Zealand to build himself a bunker in anticipation of a catastrophic event. In reality he digs the New Zealand earth to extract billions of dollars of rare earths in a national park.

The two meet and soon, Mira believes she can use Robert Lemoine’s money and land to carry out her mission, while Robert Lemoine wants to use Birnam Wood to camouflage his operations. We also meet Tony Gallo, a young idealistic journalist, as well as a recently knighted New Zealand businessman, Sir Owen Darvish, and his wife.

The first half of the novel puts all the elements of the story in place and it’s actually my favourite part. Catton displays a light sense of humour that I hadn’t felt in the previous book. It seems to me that she is  settling scores, to a certain extent with New Zealand, where she was criticized extensively after the publication of The Luminaries , among other things, because she was not shy about her criticism of New Zealand. The Prime Minister at the time did not particularly like it and the quarrel escalated to the point where her father (a lecturer at the University of Canterbury where I worked at the time) felt the need to publicly demand that  we stop harassing his daughter (as far as I’m concerned, it’s more the dad’s intervention that I found irritating).  She enjoys  making fun of the increasingly ridiculous honours that are awarded indiscriminately to just about anyone. They disappeared for a while, but the aforementioned Prime Minister restored them so he could become a Sir himself! Since then, we have rewarded just about anyone for just about anything and it has become a joke, I completely agree with Catton. Other criticisms of New Zealand, however, sometimes seem unfair to me when it asserts that certain behaviours are typical of New Zealanders  when in fact it is typical human pettiness or jealousy. For instance, if we except the United States (but maybe it is an outdated  and unfair cliche), where becoming rich is seen as a clear sign of success, billionaires are not  particularly popular in most countries, I would say. She also mentions a negative attitude towards people who live abroad for some time, a lack of curiosity, anger from the family sometime also, but I have experienced the same (I paid a visit to somebody I had not seen in twenty years and she asked me one question, the rest of the two hours was devoted to herself. Not that I particularly enjoy being the centre of attention, in fact it is quite the opposite, but I was impressed by the lack of curiosity and the indifference). It does not seem to me to be a New Zealand thing.

I found the second part less interesting, it seemed to fall back into the habits that had annoyed me in the previous book with useless descriptions. That being said, it’s a thought I have almost every time I have read a book recently, where I find long unnecessary passages that I would have eliminated (do we do this to give the reader more bang for their buck? ?). I particularly appreciated that she gently made fun of activists and billionaires with a certain lightness. It also raises essential questions about the type of world we are building (or enduring). I found the ending disappointing, but that ‘s also been the case for quite a while with most of the books I read (or TV shows I watch).

The book will no doubt be translated into French soon , but for those who read a little English, it reads quite well. I read it in a week when I was in Pohara .