The author says of her new novel, ‘I wanted this to be a book where nobody thought they were the bad guy and everybody was a plausible contender for the role.’
Ten years ago, Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to win the prestigious Booker Prize, earning it forIn the years since, the New Zealander, who now lives in England, wrote screenplays , got married and had a child. But it took years before she felt ready to write another book.“I did feel a lot of uncertainty after winning the prize,” Catton, 37, said in a recent video interview. “I worried that people would not be reliable about telling me if something I wrote was no good.
Mira and Shelley are struggling to keep Birnam Wood, their guerilla eco-friendly gardening cooperative afloat when Mira finds a potential lifesaver in an American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who admires her willingness to break the law to achieve her goals. But Lemoine, who has been exploiting a wealthy New Zealand couple, Jill and Owen Darvish, for his own selfish ends, should not be trusted.
“New Zealand as a country has been incredibly hospitable to wealthy people, who are often quite sinister figures,” Catton says, “and the Darvishes knew from the beginning that Robert was a bad guy but it doesn’t matter because they wanted to bask vicariously in his fame.” I was interested in how my characters’ certainties and convictions lead them into blindness. Each one has a fatal blindness — there’s some part of the plot they overlook because of their certainty.That’s probably a reflection of the terror I feel about accelerated social change. The book is set in 2017 but I wrote most of it from lockdown onwards and so much had changed in such a short time. I think social media has done that.
So much of the formation of ideas ideally comes out of conversation, hearing how someone responds to the phrasing or comes up with a counterargument. That kind of living negotiation of what we think and feel is so important but on social media you’re not in a room with anybody so you can just blurt something out and it will stay in a vacuum without those emotional negotiations and accommodations, where you learn from the mistakes and inarticulacies and offenses you cause in the moment.
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