Eleanor Catton on her new book ‘Birnam Wood’: ‘I hope the novel feels like an antidote to the kind of conversation you get online’

The origins of Eleanor Catton’s third novel came from a place of unbridled literary ambition: subverting Shakespeare.

When she started toying with the idea for what would become “Birnam Wood,” Catton knew she wanted to craft a narrative that forced its reader to confront the spectre of Macbeth, the doomed Scottish thane who murders King Duncan and pays dearly for his own ambition.

“As I conceived it, naturally a reader would be thinking, who’s going to be the Macbeth of this novel?” Catton said on a Zoom call from Cambridge, U.K., where she currently makes her home. “But I wanted to write it in such a way that, hopefully, your expectations would keep getting frustrated.”

What has resulted from that germ of an idea is one of the freshest, most invigorating novels to appear so far this year. Set in 2017, it tells the story of Mira Bunting, founder of a collective of guerrilla gardeners called Birnam Wood, who surreptitiously invade plots of land where they can plant and harvest crops unnoticed by the broader public. When an earthquake causes a landslide that isolates the New Zealand town of Thorndike, the group senses an opportunity to exploit the land in the affected area. This brings Mira into conflict with Robert Lemoine, a billionaire from the U.S. who has plans of his own for the land.

Catton first conceived of the book in 2017, but had to take time off because she became involved in writing the screenplay for the BBC miniseries adaptation of her 2013 Booker Prize-winning novel “The Luminaries,” something she said she essentially volunteered for. “The producer who had bought the rights had sent it to a bunch of people who said no,” Catton said. “And after about the 10th person said no, I said, ‘Maybe I could give it a go.’”

The experience of adapting “The Luminaries” taught her a great deal, though she admits it was more difficult and painful than any previous writing experience. In fact, many of her friends and colleagues had warned her off attempting to adapt her own work, though this might have had the unintended effect of pushing her headlong into the experience. “I’m quite a stubborn person; when people tell me not to do something, I quite like to do the opposite,” she said. “Now that I’ve been through it, I can see the wisdom in the people who said don’t do it.”

Her foray into screenwriting did not end with the television adaptation of “The Luminaries”; her screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” starring Anya Taylor-Joy, hit theatres in 2020. And as if that weren’t enough, Catton also had a baby before returning her attention to “Birnam Wood.”

The new novel, like the two that preceded it (2008’s “The Rehearsal,” which won the Amazon First Novel Award, and “The Luminaries,” which also won a Governor General’s Literary Award), is set in New Zealand, where Catton moved with her family when she was six. (She was born in London, Ont., to an American father and a New Zealander mother; her two siblings were born in New Zealand. She calls herself the “rogue Canadian” in her family.)

Though popularly associated with New Zealand, Catton has been living in England “off and on” since 2017, moving there full-time in 2019 to be with her husband, who works at Cambridge University. “I experienced the pandemic over here rather than in the idyllic conditions in New Zealand,” she said.

The turn of phrase makes it sound as though Catton considers her former home to be an unalloyed paradise, but nothing could be further from the truth. In conversation, she provided a highly nuanced take on the country’s values, its people and its government. That nuance also makes it into “Birnam Wood.”

One aspect of the country’s social environment that comes in for explicit critique in the novel is its attractiveness as a haven for billionaires like Robert Lemoine. The fictional tycoon is not cut from whole cloth, but resembles real-world figures such as Peter Thiel, who was granted citizenship in the country having spent a scant 12 days there. “New Zealand has been incredibly hospitable to foreign millionaires and billionaires,” she said. “It’s been part of the national conversation for a long time.”

Critiques like this are somewhat easier to make from afar, Catton said, especially when one takes into account the nature of the country and its citizenry. “It’s very important for New Zealanders to be seen as benign and essentially good-hearted,” she said. “It’s not entirely dissimilar from Canada.”

And while Catton does not consider herself an explicitly political writer, she does feel that novels — even a historical novel like “The Luminaries” — have a responsibility to the present.

In that regard, “Birnam Wood” addresses a number of pressing issues in our contemporary world: sustainability, income inequality, surveillance capitalism and the dangers of what might be termed selfish altruism. “It feels to me now that this is a moment where the novel needs to stand up and assert the power that it has as a form to expose the poverty of other ways we have of experiencing the world,” she said.

Nor is she reluctant to specify what those other ways might be: Catton locates an urgency in standing up for the novel form as against the formlessness of social media such as Twitter. When she was writing “Birnam Wood,” she took pains to ensure it was a novel in which characters were allowed to express nuanced opinions and engage in dialogue that transcends the 280-character sound bites online.

“I knew from the very beginning with this book that I wanted it to be a novel with a lot of conversations in it,” she said. “A book of connections and of presence, where people were exploring their full humanity for better and for worse. And that the novel would feel to the reader, hopefully, like an antidote to the kind of conversation that you get online, which is not a conversation at all but this series of discrete, atemporal transmissions that come at you in a bewildering way. I wanted the novel to live in that complexity.”

It’s an ambition worthy of Shakespeare.

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