Abby spoke with Eleanor Catton about her latest book, Birnam Wood - a finalist for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Birnam Wood took the book world by storm in early 2023, and sat at the top of Time Out’s bestsellers list for many months of that year. It’s no surprise then to see it on the Ockhams fiction shortlist. I loved getting to talk to Eleanor about this gripping, astute, and richly-layered thriller:
You’ve previously won a New Zealand Book Award in 2014 for The Luminaries. What do you think is the biggest thing that’s changed about your writing/you as a writer since then?
I believe much more passionately than I ever did that fiction is a moral art form; that even at its most entertaining—and maybe especially at its most entertaining—fiction is the best tool we have for exploring intentions and actions, causes and effects. I’ve always loved plot, but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve been able to articulate why I think it’s so important.
All three of your books are so distinct from one another - did you ever worry about what readers’ opinions of Birnam Wood would be, seeing as it’s so different from The Luminaries?
Not really. I did resolve not to write another 800-pager—I figured people might not forgive me for that—but I think that every book has to justify its existence on its own terms.
What was it like writing a novel set in such a particular political time, when that landscape is constantly changing? For example, if you started Birnam Wood now, when the year since its release has seen such a dramatic shift in NZ politics, do you think the novel would turn out differently?
It’s hard to say, because I never wanted the book to be partisan in its politics. I might have made the NZ government more complicit in Lemoine’s activities, perhaps, but topicality is a dangerous thing to aim for in fiction: nothing dates faster. Birnam Wood is set in 2017, when I was around Tony’s age, and not much older than Mira. I felt I understood them in a generational sense. I shared the hope that had been kindled by the election of Barack Obama, by Occupy Wall Street, by the Arab Spring; I shared their growing disillusionment with social media, and all the other disappointments they’d suffered as that decade wore on. (I still cringe to remember that the OED word of the year for 2017 was ‘youthquake’.) So in a sense the book was always written as a period piece. But of course my own personal circumstances are always changing, as everybody's are. If I were to start writing Birnam Wood now, it would be as a 38-year-old and as a mother, which inevitably would have a bearing on the work.
I think I’ve just talked myself full circle: my new answer is that yes, the novel would absolutely turn out differently if I wrote it now. It would be different in every single way.
Do you feel any obligation, as such an internationally successful author, to continue to write New Zealand stories? Do you think you’ll ever write about elsewhere?
I have lived in the UK continuously since 2019, and I think it would be very hard for me to write a novel set in present-day New Zealand because my experience of the pandemic was so different to how it was experienced back home. That has more to do with the need for the work to be convincing than it has to do with any sense of obligation, though. I’m also a Canadian author—I was born in Canada—and I actually feel much more of an obligation to address that in my fiction somehow. Someday!
Obviously the core of the novel is Macbethian, but you’ve also mentioned being inspired by Mary Shelley and by working on the film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. How important do you think it is for other writers like yourself (and the general public) to be reading classics today?
More than important. Vital. We can’t understand our own age properly without a sense of how things have changed. I can never take a writer seriously if I find out that they refuse to read the giants of the past. But equally, I can’t trust writers who scorn to read contemporary fiction. They’re just as impoverished, and maybe more so, because they risk losing sight of their readers, who can only exist in the present, and nowhere else.
The flip side of this is the crime/thriller influences of the book. Was it a balancing act of classical, literary, and genre fiction elements, or did that relationship come naturally?
Emma has famously been called the world’s first detective novel, and in a way, Macbeth is our first example of an ingenious plot twist: really a double twist, first the fact that Birnam Wood is made to move, and then, the fact that Macduff was not technically born of woman. So they both gave me a lot to work with on a genre level while also being formally, and literarily, exemplary.
You’ve said the first seeds of Birnam Wood were sown (excuse the pun) during a writer’s residency in Amsterdam above a left-wing bookstore filled with protest books. Were there any specific books that helped shape your characters/story?
David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform, Eliot Higgins’ We Are Bellingcat, and Katrin Marcal’s Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? all had a huge influence on Birnam Wood. But for me inspiration is as often negative as it is positive. Mark Bray’s Antifa, for example, was influential precisely because of how much it annoyed me.
If you were a bookseller, how would you sell your book to a potential reader?
It was always my hope that Birnam Wood would be the kind of book that you’d have to stay up late to finish. So maybe I'd say that. But I find this question slightly queasy-making, because I don’t really think it’s the author’s place to say whether their book achieves its ambitions or not.
Do you have anything you can share with us about your next book, Doubtful Sound, yet?
I can give you the first sentence: Eight months after my divorce from Dominic, I saw a woman he had led me to believe was dead.
Give us a quick review of the other finalists on the shortlist, if you’ve read them!
Pip Adam’s game-breaking, ground-changing Audition will break your heart and rearrange your brain, but not in that order. Reading Emily Perkins’ subtle and provocative Lioness, I kept thinking of a line from Diana Athill’s memoir, how the best observers of human nature are ‘lit by humour but above malice’; there’s so much warmth to the humour in this book, which is never malicious, even at its most satirical. The blunt, vernacular style of Stephen Daisley’s A Better Place kept astounding me, page after page, with its emotional scope; I had to keep reminding myself that this was a work of the imagination and not an eyewitness account. And the foot! Oh my God, the foot.
Short version: all three are terrific books!