Birnam Wood revisited

If, like me, you neglected to read the blurb on the back and were expecting Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood to be a reimagining of Macbeth, you will probably have received quite a shock. I try to read anything I can of Eleanor Catton's work, so I didn't really mind  at all that it did not involve chopping down forests and soldiers disguised as trees.

Birnam Wood, in this case, refers to a counter-cultural market gardening project, a soi-disant "activist collective", on the South Island of New Zealand, and the story is very much a modern day affair. (I tend to think of Ms. Catton as Canadian but, although she was born in Canada and now lives in the UK, she was in fact brought up in New Zealand and has strong ties to the country - I imagine all three countries claim her.)

Some of the personalities involved in the collective are strong-minded and spiky, and there is some unresolved history behind some of them. Add in a mysterious, shady, tech-bro, American billionaire with a risky and illegal plan to secretly strip the area of billions (trillions?) of dollars in rare earth minerals and smuggle them out, and who surprisingly seems to want to invest big money in the collective (leading to some intense discussions on principles), and an ultra-radical freelance journalist and estranged collective member, and the stage is set for an unusual and quite interesting plot.

But for me, the plot is secondary to Ms. Catton's fine prose, her often long and involved sentences, and her delicious turn of phrase. Just a few examples from early in the book:

"She had feared, in lonely moments, that for her parents she existed merely as a kind of party trick, a dazzling proof of how well she had been parented, a living testament not to her own powers of conviction and discernment, but to theirs."

"Her favoured style of conversation was impassioned argument that bordered on seduction, and although it was distasteful, not to mention tactically unwise, to admit that one enjoyed flirtation, she never felt freer, or funnier, or more imaginatively potent, than when she was the only woman in the room."

Always a reliable read, Ms. Catton has triumphed again.