Eleanor Catton's novel, 'Birnam Wood,' centers on young members of a radical environmental group who wind up entangled with a billionaire drone manufacturer. Our critic devoured all 400+ pages in two days.
of that novel. Mira's sense of political righteousness blinds her to her own motivations. The disaffected Shelley accuses her of "rebelling for the sake of it, like she had always done, acting as though the rules that bound the little people were just too tiresome and ordinary to apply to her."as well as Austen — Catton likes to confront her characters with choices and then lay bare the consequences, often unintended, of what they've chosen.
You see, while our heroes in the collective are muddling their way through ordinary human issues, they're faced with a villain from a 21st-century thriller. Lemoine isn't merely an amoral billionaire with all the compassion of one of his drones. He's a high-tech bad guy, complete with NSA-level spyware and mercenaries to do his bidding. Too bad to be true, he's so skillful at wielding his malignancy that, in spite of herself, Catton seems to hold him in a kind of awe.
Normally, it would be an artistic flaw that realistic characters like Mira, Shelley, Tony and the Darvishes must confront such a comic-book baddie, and I guess it is here: What starts off looking like a novel about character winds up in a climax out of a genre novel. Yet the story plays like gangbusters: I devoured all 400-plus pages in two days.
And in showing the collective's encounter with Lemoine, Catton taps into a feeling very much of our moment. We live at a time when many environmentalists feel helpless next to mega-rich forces who seem able to despoil the planet as they wish and to avoid any governmental attempts to check them. InFacebook
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