Library 3, Former 321

Eleanor Catton. Birnam Wood. Ebook download from TPL. Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 2023.

Yes, my waiting list is flooding in. Catton's novel receives a lot of attention; her writing is intense and intellectual. Personally, I need to switch gears, slow down, for the lonnng paragraphs and precise exposition of what makes the main characters tick. Yet her prose is meticulous, polished, and covers so much of global existential concerns so well.

Mira Bunting established a collective of New Zealand eco-warriors who use vacant land, legally or not, to grow organic food. Birnam Wood is their name, a grassroots solidarity social order their goal. She's always on the lookout for large properties for more meaningful production; a neglected farm in an isolated area, owned by Owen and Jill Darvish, looks ideal. Darvish, who is about to be knighted for environmentally propitious initiatives, retained the farmhouse but was secretly selling the land to American billionaire Robert Lemoine for his "doomstead." New Zealand is popular among the 1% for building elaborate bunkers to inhabit at End Times. Lemoine gives a lavish donation to Birnam Wood (they are always broke) and permission to use this farm land, expressing admiration for their socialist ideals. The group approves by consensus, with the exception of furious would-be journalist Tony. Even Shelley, Mira's right-hand person, decides to stay with the group when she was just beginning to see no future in it.

In short, Lemoine has an ulterior motive for keeping the do-gooders close. The bunker he is outfitting is a cover for illegally extracting a lode of rare earth minerals from a national park that will make him another fortune. Birnam Wood working on nearby crops is more camouflage. His company, Autonomo, makes sophisticated drones; with that and being a tech wizard himself, he can access Mira's (or almost anyone's) every move and conversation. Tony believes Birnam Wood has sold out to capitalism, sensing something off. He wants nothing more than to write "a searing indictment of the super-rich—hypocrites, cancerous polluters, confirmed sociopaths, crypto-fascist dirty tricksters, tax-dodging economic parasites ...". It could be the story that makes Tony's career. Hence his camping out there to observe.

All the elements of environmental polemic are here in a great story; character motivations are carefully probed. Catton has perfectly captured the feelings and struggles of a growing movement to share the earth, stop the damage. When Owen Darvish accidentally dies, their reality and dynamics change. Lemoine needs to halt corollary damage immediately, whether the only witnesses ‒ Mira and Shelley ‒ agree or not. Shakespeare's Birnam Wood (Macbeth) is on the march in a novel of amazing breadth and intricate depth. It will leave you breathless. Take all the reading time you need.

WORD: metonymic = a figure of speech substituting a word associated with or attributed to the object

Mira

▪ Like all self-mythologizing rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. (18)

▪ Her ambition for Birnam Wood was nothing less than radical, widespread, and lasting social change, which would be entirely achievable, she was convinced, if only people could be made to see how much fertile land was going begging, all around them, every day ... . (32)

▪ " ... it's not exactly the kind of bedfellow any of us would choose, and he's totally one of those apocalypse preppers or survivalists or whatever you call them, you know, like, he got his pilot's licence, he has a plane, he's bought this farm, like, totally off the radar, and he's even putting in a bunker, so, full cliché ‒" (152)

▪ "Tony made me feel like things were possible. Like I was possible. Like there was time." (519)

Lemoine

▪ ... by the second time she reached the second gate, he had forced a connection with her phone, accessed her identifying information, obtained her stored encryption key, simulated her over-the-air transmissions, established a connection to the local mast, and then authenticated himself so that from that point forward, he could appear to Mira's service as Mira's phone, and to Mira's phone as her service provider. (104)

▪ His wealth was his revenge. His mystique, his opacity, his protean curiosity and impenetrable charm—these were not intrinsic aspects of his character, but cultivated acts of vengeance against everyone who had deceived him, his parents, his grandparents, the army, the government, the CIA. (292)

▪ Darvish hadn't been a conservationist. He'd just been an ordinary self-serving opportunist who had been knighted for no better reason than political expedience and plain dumb luck. (414)

Shelley

▪ ... her role as the sensible, dependable, predictable sidekick, never quite as rebellious as Mira, never quite as free-thinking, never—even when they acted together—quite as brave. (28)

▪ ... Shelley realised with a lurch that Mira was desperate for her approval. (136)

▪ "I was leaving. I mean, I am leaving. This is me leaving. I'm leaving Birnam Wood." (385)

▪ She reassured herself that the rest of Birnam Wood remained unaware that Owen Darvish had ever existed, let alone that he had very recently been killed. (458)

Tony

▪ "Or, like, the term 'free market'," he was saying now. "It's totally a propaganda term, and yet we all use it, even on the left. It's insane." (136)

▪ "He's literally the opposite of everything we stand for." (154)

▪ ... he could recognise devastation when he saw it; he could recognise the signs of toxic, rapacious, unconscionable, imperialist-stage-capitalist industrial disgrace. (418)

Katy Brent. How to Kill Men and Get Away With It. Ebook download from TPL. UK: HarperCollins, 2022.

The novel describes the life that Gen X or millennials or whatever their label is, can only dream of. We have a close-knit cohort of four single 30-something women living their best life in London; rich enough to not have to work, gorgeous enough to attract plenty of men, spending most of their time at trendy bars and parties. Kitty Collins is a massively popular Influencer on 'Gram (Instagram, for those of you over 40), so posting glamour photos of her activities takes up a certain amount of her time. Kitty is our narrator, the only one who is apparently without serial boyfriends. Some time ago she was hurt by one cheating Adam; trusting another man with her feelings seems like never. The friends ‒ Kitty, Hen, Maisie, and Tor ‒ drink a lot, sleep around a lot, and have angry group discussions about each man that once again fails them.

Life takes a twist: Kitty accidentally and hilariously kills a couple of deserving men; let's call them Nos. 1 and 2. Her family wealth comes from the meat-packing industry with plenty of slaughter houses around the country to dispose of inconvenient corpses. Exacting revenge for Maisie's distress over No. 3 (Daniel) does not go according to plan, but she becomes a one-woman crusade to rid the world, London at least, of shallow, unfeeling, predatory men who hurt women. It's not difficult to assess and lure the fools on dating websites. A worthy goal, some will say, but Kitty is losing her charm and recognizing that she has issues by the time she kills someone by mistake. And we learn that No. 1 was not the first. Worst of all, she has a stalker who knows everything she's doing.

During this righteous mission, Kitty meets Charlie who ticks all the boxes for a decent, caring human being, and she's falling hard for him despite all the barriers she'd put up. Can any of this end well? It's actually an amazing character study with a shock ending. Along with a peek into the privilege and pastimes of her social-media-addicted circle, laden with label-dropping—clothing, shoes, restaurants, furniture, etc—it's a different world, but the struggle is real. Existential and entertaining. Bravo, Katy Brent.

Bits

▪ He referred to himself as an "entrepreneur"! Which everyone knows is shorthand for twat. (30)

▪ The force of the thrust stuns me and I'm surprised by the noise it makes as it connects with his head. (63-4)

▪ The world is better without these men, these cheaters, liars and predators. I'm just helping out really, cleansing a society that's almost too grubby to bear. (74)

▪ It's my calling. I hear you. And I'm coming. (90)

▪ I look at him. Pathetic and shrivelled up and sweating like a, well, like a fucking rapist. (146)

▪ "Abattoir Princess," I remind him. "Not my first rodeo with an axe." (180)

▪ I'm not a vegan for vanity, Tor," I tell her for the gazillionth time. (204)

▪ "That's what you girls do, isn't it? Get over one man by getting under another and all that?" (245)

▪ There are too many balls in the air and my hands are slippery with blood. (288)

▪ "These are lies, Kitty. She's a fucking lunatic." (338)