Eleanor Catton talks about ‘Birnam Wood’ and ‘the seduction of certainty’

Expertly crafted by Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton, “Birnam Wood” delivers a heart-pumping thriller loaded with characters, conversations, and betrayals. Set in the southern wilds of New Zealand, the novel follows a group of local guerrilla gardeners on a collision course with a cynical and conniving American billionaire. The result is a moral satire spiked with tragic consequences – but also, Ms. Catton insists, notes of hope. She spoke with Monitor contributor Erin Douglass.

The novel’s title alludes to Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth.” Why ground your story in this play?

The book arose out of the political upheavals of 2016, which sent me back to “Macbeth.” I had the sense that the play would have something to say about our unsettled times, not least because many people were getting good at diagnosing Macbeth-like – and Lady Macbeth-like – qualities in their political enemies, but never in themselves. 

It seemed at that time that no matter what you believed politically, one thing was consistent across the spectrum: Everyone was saying, “Oh, we’re so hopelessly polarized.” But nobody seemed willing to follow that statement with, “And the person who needs to change is me.” Everyone could see the problem, but they located the responsibility for fixing the problem in someone else.

It was against that backdrop that I went back to “Macbeth” and, suddenly, saw it in a totally new way. It seemed to be a play about the seduction of certainty – how alluring it is, and what a tremendous relief it is, to be dealt a prophecy that tells you something is definitely going to happen. I felt for Macbeth in a funny kind of way! 

In a recent online discussion, you talked about irony and belief in some really striking ways. Why is irony so important?

I believe that irony is a profoundly human condition. It’s to understand in the deepest sense that opposites belong together and, paradoxically, can coexist. “There’s freedom to be found in constraint,” for example. 

There’s a certain kind of intellectual certainty that tries to get rid of irony. ... This is the logic of the person who says, “Because of who I am, I can’t possibly do wrong,” which sounds really good if it’s somebody you agree with – and utterly monstrous if it’s someone you disagree with. ...

An accelerant in all this has been social media. Basically, it makes irony impossible. We’ve gotten used to these radically dehumanized, distorting environments online – and we’ve come to have these same expectations of the real world. This is terrifying to me. My response was to design the book so that it offers old-fashioned pleasures of face-to-face conversation, action, and proper debate. Even a debate that goes hopelessly wrong is still happening in a room between people who are reacting to one another and fighting for airtime. 

You’ve also remarked that conversation is plot. What’s the role of talk in the novel?

It was important to me to make the characters feel real enough that when they finally betray themselves – when they precipitate the various catastrophes that each of them is responsible for later in the book – the reader has no doubt that those actions are their choices, something they did, rather than something that I maneuvered them into doing. I also think there’s something hopeful in the fact that basically all the catastrophes throughout the book could have been averted if the characters had conversed with one another. I wanted the book to have a hopeful stance toward conversation. It is messy and it is frustrating, but the nihilism of shutting down channels of conversation is much scarier. 

Does a selfish motive that results in a benefit to others get transformed somehow? Or is it still fundamentally icky?

In a way, it’s a question that will never be settled, because motivation can be lied about. You can say you were doing something for one reason when you’re really not – and sometimes you may even be lying to yourself. 

It’s one of the reasons why I think the novel is uniquely powerful in providing a moral playground. It’s this place where we can go to explore how motivation leads into action and how action leads to consequence. Film and television are wonderful, but they don’t get to the heart of motivation in quite the same way. A novel can situate the reader inside somebody else in a way that seems to me is desperately important – particularly because we’re spending more and more time in these digital spaces.

Did writing the book lead you to think differently about integrity? 

I wanted to push the characters toward making bad choices, rather than good choices, so characters acting without integrity were more at the top of my mind than characters acting with integrity! 

The moral work of human beings is never finished. It’s no good telling somebody younger than you, “Don’t worry about it; we figured this out.” Things have to be rediscovered and questioned by every generation. Integrity is able to flourish in circumstances where there is a lot of conversation about what has happened.

Any final comments?

I have faith in change. And change on a human level, not on a societal level. We’ve become very sneery about human change, but if you don’t have that faith in human change, you’re kind of doomed before you begin. Everybody can change.