If you don’t dislike everybody, is the author even trying?
Birnam Wood, the wood, is Macbeth’s downfall coming for him in ways he did not at all foresee.
Birnam Wood, the group, is a loose collective devoted to growing food in underused urban spaces.
Birnam Wood, the novel centers on Mira, the self-absorbed self-proclaimed leader and idea-generator of BW, her quiet sidekick/roommate Shelley who handles all the real, boring, administrative work out of chronic self-doubt and need for Mira’s approval, and Tony, a trust fund grandson who can’t settle to anything but obsessing over his once-upon-a-time drunken hookup with Mira.
They and their largely nameless fellow travelers maintain dozens of urban food sites with and without permission, electrical connections, and legit water supplies, dispersing their harvests among land providers, each other, and the city’s food charities. Nobody can fault their work ethic, even if their self-absorption and petty squabbles make for dull reading until nearly a quarter of the way through the tome.
This is not eco-thriller territory. What little action occurs is all tiny and mundane, on the scale of washing dishes or having a bowl of soup, and almost entirely lacking in suspense or tension or danger. As many reviewers before me have mentioned, you can probably skip or skim the first 100 pages and enjoy the rest as a thriller no more improbable than any Bond movie, although with a more ambiguous ending.
Eventually, Mira’s newest self-laudatory scheme brings them into the orbit of billionaire capitalist plunderer Robert, another prime candidate for the blind hubris of a Macbeth marching obvious to his own doom.
After stumbling over Mira in a place she has no business being, Robert decides to use the collective for PR cover while he secretly strips a lot of rare-earth minerals out of a national park, destroying irreplaceable ecosystems as a disregarded byproduct. A bit of psychological manipulation and a judicious infusion of cash brings Mira, and thus the BW collective, into his personal puppet show.
It’s a classic environmentalists-versus-capitalists tale except, as mentioned above, you don’t care about any of them. Well, maybe Shelley, once she stops being Mira’s doormat. But fear not: you’ll surely despise her later, albeit for different reasons (in truth, the environmentalists separately and together are about as appealing as King Lear’s problematic daughters and far less fun than Macbeth's three witches).
The Birnam Wood lot are the good-banal: white and middle class, given to intellectual/philosophical polemics, virtue-signaling, and purity-testing…in other words, all the leftist habits routinely memed and mocked by the political right. The capitalist plunderer is the bad-banal: a billionaire with all the tech toys, unlimited cash, and unquestioning goons to follow his increasingly unethical orders. He’s a big-headed cartoon villain out of leftist conspiracy theories, whose every public action is cover for an evil plot that in itself is cover for an even more evil plot.
Despite all the words expended in their respective self-justifying inner monologues (and there are a LOT of those), none of these characters rise above the level of caricature. Given fewer wordy inner monologues and more actions indicative of emotional truth, I might have been moved by the increasingly dire plights of the collective members. But they were as painted trees dragged about the stage by a guiding hand not the equal of the author of Macbeth.
The thriller part starts to crank up steam around the half, and thereafter gains pace as well as some gross improbabilities that would be easier to overlook in a 2-hour movie than in a novel. Given the collective’s focus, there is less garden or vegetative imagery than you might expect, although the tidbit that fennel inhibits the growth of other plants makes a rather neat metaphor for both Robert and Mira. There are some shaky forensic assumptions that wouldn’t fool most watchers of modern crime shows. For the grand finale, picture Hamlet by way of South American drug cartels.
The novel is competently written in plain language and – no mean feat - manages to be even-handed in its disdain for all sides in the environmentalists-versus-capitalists battle. The most convincing part, for me, was the cynical presentation of just how readily governments local and national let environmental protections fall by the wayside through inadequate regulation, lax oversight, and non-existent enforcement. None of these cutout characters can beat a real-live politician for sheer self-centered hubris and willingness to overlook or whitewash almost any environmental or social catastrophe if by so doing he/they can gain a single scintilla more power or influence or favourable press.
#ecothriller #BirnamWood #Shakespeare #NewZealand #politicians #environment #RareEarthMinerals #mining #NationalPark #hubris #NetGalley #review #amreading #crimefiction
