Poured Over: Eleanor Catton on Birnam Wood

By Miwa Messer / March 7, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I’m interested in how deceptions can make you feel more of yourself or can unlock something in you that you didn’t know you had.”

Eleanor Catton, Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, is back with Birnam Wood —part eco-thriller, part social and political satire, wholly insightful. This propulsive novel is prescient, timely, and all-too relatable in our present day. Catton joins us in conversation about creating her characters, Shakespeare’s use of prophecy and power, how the story was influenced by Jane Austen’s Emma and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer. Listen after the episode for a TBR Topoff from Marc and Madyson.

Featured Books (Episode)
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
We are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins
Emma by Jane Austen
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
On Writing by Stephen King

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
The Appeal by Janice Hallett
Wilder Girls by Rory Power

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays here and on your favorite podcast app.  

Full Episode Transcript:
MM
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for her first or second novel, excuse me, The Luminaries, which was 863 pages of a most excellent story set during New Zealand’s gold rush in the 1860s. And you may have also seen the adaptation that Eleanor wrote. We’re here to talk about Birnam Wood, which I love this book. I love the dread. I love the claustrophobia. I love the characters. I love the inevitability of the ending, all of it, all of it. And it is a very different book from The Luminaries. So, Eleanor, hi, thank you so much for joining us. But where did this book come from?

Eleanor Catton
Hi, thank you so much for having me. I’m so looking forward to having a chat. Where did it come from, in a way it kind of came out of a feeling of betrayal, I suppose that I had, looking around me at how politicians the world over were kind of failing people of my generation, in pretty much any measure you could you could think of, and that sense of kind of despair, I suppose about the future that seemed to set in a very particular way around about 2016. Suddenly, these intimations that we all we maybe had had, for some time that the future was going to get very dark very soon. It seems more real than ever, and kind of more inescapable than ever. And I wanted to write about this very kind of contemporary feeling, not in a way that would advance a particular political point of view, but in a way that would kind of maybe just, problematize, or dramatize this relationship that we had with the future, which is one of the reasons why I went back to Macbeth, actually, because it’s, of course, Macbeth is a play that’s all about prophecy. It’s animated by prophecy and so I went back to that play and reread it kind of with everything that was happening in terms of world events, resounding in my head, and suddenly saw in a really different way, I sort of as a play that contains very interesting and loud warnings about what happens when you regard the future with too much certainty if you’re if you’re too convinced about what lies just down the road, because of course, Macbeth makes the ending of Macbethhappens. None of that was written on the wall before him before he received those prophecies and I kind of wanted to achieve a similar effect in a novel by writing a book about incremental political actions and moral actions that ended up kind of having these enormous effects that were avoidable, like the ending that was avoidable, but hopefully feels like the accumulation of all of the human errors that came before.

When I realized what was happening and how it was happening, oh, yes. The payoff is really, really excellent. I mean, this is part eco-thriller, it’s part political commentary, as you just mentioned, but it’s also a social satire. And I have to say, so one of the British reviews said, you know, guerrilla gardeners, and I was like, gardening seems a very soft word to use for what your incarnation of Birnam Wood is about. Guerilla is definitely right, but garden doesn’t quite strike what they’re doing. But can you explain your Birnam Wood?

In the novel, that’s the name that a group of activists in New Zealand give to themselves. And they’re kind of broadly left-wing, kind of anti-capitalist, mostly fairly young, they’re kind of mostly millennials and younger, what they do is they go around the South Island of New Zealand, which is where I grew up and plant sustainable edible gardens in neglected spaces. And sometimes they do this in collaboration with the people who own the land, in exchange for half of the yield of whatever they grow, but more often, they do it illegally and, you know, in public spaces and via trespassing and, and that kind of thing. So they’re a group that when the novel begins, has reached a kind of impasse, where they’ve kind of reached the limit of, of how big they can grow without a kind of a serious rethink of their principles as a as an organization. They’ve never quite incorporated or kind of joined the conventional economy. And for some people within the group to do that would be totally anathema to what the group is all about and for others, that’s the only means of survival. And so, in some ways, I kind of saw this group as facing a challenge that I think faces a lot of left wing organizations, which is that do you compromise a little on your principles and maybe succeed in the conventional economy, or do you hold fast to your principles and possibly lose? Or kind of go extinct? You know, those are the options sometimes.

So, we meet three early, I guess, early 20sw— Mira, and Shelley and Tony.

Maybe late 20s. They’re a little younger than me.

So late 20s out of school, Mira has ostensibly, let’s just refer to it as founding Birnam Wood. I mean, she sort of created it, everyone else sort of fell into it. And she’s lived quite a nice life. But her parents were not fully expecting this to be the thing that she does. This was not sort of the plan. And she’s very charismatic, and she convinces a lot of people to join, but she’s a great character to follow. And then we also meet Shelley who’s sort of her, she’s presented as kind of like best pals side kicky. But Shelley shows us who she is, too. And then there’s Tony, who was one of the original founders, but has left for the US and has now or am I assuming he left for the US?

He was he was in Mexico. Yeah,

He was in Mexico, okay. And now he’s come back to New Zealand. So, the three of them and watching sort of their evolution. I do want to start there. Because the idealism and the genuine love and concern for what they want to do. They’re still messy kids. I realized I’m talking about people in their late 20s as kids, and maybe that’s not the right word.

I think that that’s something that, for better and for worse, has come to define my generation and people younger than me—that the kind of the buy in, to the, to the economy, as practice around the world is so high, that is to kind of trap a lot of people in a state of adolescence, relative to the governance of their countries. I mean, I’m 37 now, you know, that it’s still enormous news whenever anybody of my age buys a house in New Zealand, we were all just like, how could that possibly happen? Um, whereas if you contrast that with my parents, I think they were on about the third property that they’d owned, you know, sequentially, they’d been homeowners for almost 20 years by this point. And that’s only I mean, that’s only to talk about property. It’s not really to talk about any of the other ways that young people really ought to be stakeholders in this, they ought to be shareholders in societies of which they are stakeholders. But yeah, so it’s when I first conceived of the novel, I had actually sketched out a whole lot more than on what characters I hadn’t yet kind of shaped the novel in my mind. So, I’d written out kind of character sketches for about eight or nine characters. And Shelley, interestingly, was not one of them. Mira and Tony were there in the beginning, the reason why Shelley kind of came to be created was that when I was mulling over the book, I kind of lit upon the idea for the conviction that all the great tragedies are stories, ultimately, of betrayal. They’re stories where people betray the people closest to them, but they’re also stories where people betray themselves, they kind of betrayed the better person that they could have become. And so that kind of led me to create Shelley and I took her name from one of my great literary heroes, Mary Shelley, because I wanted to kind of give the kind of planted the idea in the readers mind, even in this very subliminal way, like is, who is she? Is she Dr. Frankenstein? Or is she the monster, you know, she’s, she’s kind of this figure who’s lived in mirrors shadow for a long time and has a complicated relationship with that, I think that she was very eager to play that role in the beginning. And it is it’s, it’s kind of started to chafe a little bit, it’s turned into a little bit of resentment. And she also, in a very ordinary human way, I think, has grown tired of the privations that this kind of life of activism is a kind of asking of her. And so, at the very beginning of the book, she’s kind of looking for a way out. And when Tony returns from overseas, she, she thinks to herself, oh, what a great idea. I know what I’ll do, I’ll sleep with this guy, because I know that Mira has been in love with him forever and he’s in love with Mira forever. And if I can just get in there and betray her, then I won’t have to have these difficult conversations because the betrayal will effectively speak for itself. So that’s, that’s kind of where she begins. It’s kind of a funny place to pick up on a character.

It was great place to pick up on a character because a lot of what you’re wrestling with comes through Mira and Shelley’s relationship, and a lot of the big philosophical questions. I mean, one point they’re fighting about, you know, which would you prefer, I shouldn’t say fighting, but they’re not agreeing on, you know, which would you prefer to do less say thank you for something you really don’t want or apologize when you don’t mean it. And I’m like, well, that’s a very sort of adolescent way to approach a problem. But at the same time, they have a lot of these conversations, and they’re really sort of feeling it out. And at one point, Shelley even says, she’s like, Oh, well, I know Mira is lying when she agrees with me with everything. This is a level of honesty from a character. I mean, Mira has moments where she really is kind of actively lying to herself. And I don’t know if she knows she’s lying to herself, because control and image is very important to her. And, I mean, it’s important to a lot of people, so I’m not smacking on the character.

No, you can smack away.

Well, Shelley is really showing us who she is. And she’s fun to read. I mean, is nefarious the right word? I mean, she wants what she wants

I love Shelley. I mean, it’s, I love all the characters in this book, and that I, it’s quite different from anything else I’ve written, actually. I think, because I was very clear in my ambition from the start that I wanted it to be a very active novel from a kind of a dramatic— whenever we wanted the characters to decide and to act and to not at all be empathetic, but to kind of, to kind of hang themselves by their own rope, in whatever way that meant. Because of that, I spent a lot of time thinking about the characters as people, kind of, what would they do in this situation? And, you know, kind of their histories and that kind of thing. And yeah, I mean, I think I think with, with Shelley and Mira, that it was, it’s a friendship that it could have been so beautiful to kind of see their friendship, they think that they do have a lot of love for each other actually. And they can make each other laugh, their senses of humor are very well matched. But they’re each like many of us, like all of us, they’re kind of scared to talk about some kind of the more uncomfortable truths about their own nature. And it’s that failure of communication of kind of failure to admit some of the, I don’t know, less palatable things about themselves to themselves and to each other, that kind of plant the seeds of this relationship going wrong.

It’s part of the fun of reading Birnam with that, because the lies, they tell each other the lies, they tell Tony, the intersection of withholding of information and then the things they put forth to each other because they’re trying to— it’s wild how they manipulate each other. And themselves, though, I mean, in some cases, they’re manipulating themselves because they don’t quite, Tony’s you know, off chasing what he’s chasing and I’m, I’m trying to stay spoiled, because this is going to air on your American pub date. But it’s wild, the intersections of these, what you think are tiny moments, right, you think they’re just tiny moments. And then oh, no, everything has consequences. Everything has consequences.

Obviously, I thought a lot about Macbeth when I was writing this, I should say that. I don’t think that a familiarity with Macbeth is at all necessary, or anything like that. But one thing that interests me about Macbeth as a play is that with all of Shakespeare’s other tragedies, especially, there are moments where you really identify with the main character, you feel like oh, I’m this I’m like King Lear on the heath. I’m like Hamlet in this moment, or whatever. I’m like Othello. But it’s very seldom that I mean, it’s never that I ever hear anybody self-identifying with Macbeth. It tends to be a weapon. You diagnose Macbeth like qualities in others. You don’t diagnose them and yourself and that got me thinking that, that I think that so much of Macbeth is actually about blindness. It’s about what he fails to see when he fails to put together and that interested me, we obviously can’t identify the blindness as in ourselves, because otherwise, there wouldn’t be blindness, it’s almost like we can’t even that state of being self-blind. We can’t even go that far to kind of admit that, yes, we too, are probably self-blind in some ways.

I mean, as an example, though, like Tony’s looking for power, though, I don’t think he would ever describe it that way. Shelley is certainly looking for power, she might admit that she’s looking for power. And Mira has a very strange relationship with power. And yet, you know, here are these three kids who are basically saying, well, I want to change the world. I want to do good here because that’s where Shelley starts too as well. But I you know, I want to make everything better and you yet, ultimately, what they’re looking for is power, and control and all of these things that are, you know, not necessarily thought of as positive attributes and people always they make for great stories. But I love that connection to Macbeth. Because I mean, ultimately, I know you said it’s a play about prophecy, but it’s also play about power.

Right and about and just about human nature, really. I think that power is a funny word, because it’s so often kind of codes negative. There are other ways, you can talk about sovereignty, or you could talk about influence. So, you could talk about notoriety, there’s this just kind of different ways of speaking about it that might seem to be more appealing in different contexts. One of the biggest nonfiction influences on this book was this marvelous book by Eliot Higgins, who is the founder of the Bellingcat, open source intelligence agency, called We are Bellingcat. And it’s just such a fascinating book, especially if you’re writing a thriller, but really, if you’re just a citizen of anywhere in the world, it’s so fascinating to read about how much open source data is out there for anybody to read and interpret in ways that have the power to topple dictators and to solve unsolved crimes. And you know, the list goes on. But again, thinking back to Macbeth, it occurred to me after having read We are Bellingcat that the things that the witches say to Macbeth, the prophecies that they that they make to him, are all actually the kind of open source information that are available that would have been available to anybody. The idea that any army that marched on Dunsinane heard the castaway. Macbeth lives would probably use forest cover as camouflage. That’s not a that’s not a prophecy. That’s just a that’s kind of kind of common sense. You know, the idea that Macduff was born by cesarean, they could have found that out by looking at his doctor’s records. Even the promotion that Macbeth gets at the beginning. And then of corridor that has already happened by the time Macbeth receives that prophecy. So it’s kind of interesting, it’s not really a play that is about all powerful forces that are telling us about a future that has to happen, no matter what it says. It’s more of a play about what happens to us when we have a sense of that inevitability, and how we kind of rush towards this future that we think we already know, that really interested me in terms of the climate crisis, because I think that there is a lot of despair, there was a lot of sense that the writing’s on the wall, that we’ve kind of passed the point of no return. And of course, like not to minimize those points of view. I mean, a lot of the time, there’s not even a point of view, it’s a scientific fact about kind of extinctions and just losses that can’t be kind of recovered. But equally, I think that if we don’t have a sense of hope about the future, that future is going to come at us so much faster, and so much worse than if we felt as though we still had a chance. I kind of I feel kind of mixed about it, you know, I wanted to play with both sides of that, that problem, I suppose.

Which brings me to three more characters in the book, because we would be remiss if we did not. So there’s, Sir Owen and Lady Darvish, who, you know, he’s kind of who you expect him to be, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Lady Darvish on the other hand, turns out to be a really excellent character she is so grounded in ways that her husband is not and then we’ve also got the guy that I took to sort of calling just the American, Robert Lemoine. I knowmy people when I see them, the three of them and the way their story intersects mirrors, kind of, the inciting incident and I’m, even though this is a big political novel, this book is so much fun to read, it is so much fun to read, because the characters balance out all of the stuff that happens and the stuff never stops happening. And here we are on a giant farm on the southern island of New Zealand. And yet, the sense of dread that I had as I was reading, thank you very much for that sense of dread and the claustrophobia and the very sort of noir atmosphere even though you are talking about people who are trying to do good then we get Sir and Lady Darvish— sorry we don’t do that here so I don’t you know.

Well, we didn’t either in New Zealand for a while, but as part of the the book’s satirical intentions… knighthoods, kind of you know, chivalric titles were abolished in New Zealand, under the Helen Clark government and then the government headed by Sir John Key brought them back, you know, with a very obvious consequence that he’d awarded himself one, or was awarded one, when he left office, which I just feel as a New Zealander is such a ludicrous situation to be in. It just kind of amuses me.

Americans have a long history of apparently buying those things from people who needed to raise money in the UK. I’m just like, Okay, can we just all of this, but I do I like it.

I think that Sir Owen is definitely the kind of person who if you asked him to sell it, he probably would.

In a heartbeat in an absolute heartbeat, but they are the extensible owners of the farm, which is a really significant size property. They’re talking about subdividing it and all of these other things. And then the American comes in, Lemoine, he and Mira meet when she breaks into the property. And he says, well, listen, I think what you’re doing is kind of cool, let me give you some money. And she goes back to Birnam Wood and it’s like, she lights a stick of dynamite. You knew though, you needed to have the Darvishes. I mean, obviously Lemoine, we will come back to him, but we kind of needed the Darvishes to set the stage in a way.

So this, you know, going back to those very, very early drafts I had, or kind of early sketches I had for the novel. The Darvishes actually weren’t a part of my initial thinking for the book, I initially just imagined it as a kind of a clash between an American billionaire who was a survivalist coming to New Zealand to buy, you know, one of these properties you often hear about in the news where ultra-wealthy people are kind of buying insurance properties in order to go and flee in the case of catastrophes that they may or may not have caused. Elsewhere in the world, the New Zealand government has been famously hospitable to the ultra-wealthy in this regard, I had kind of originally just envisioned the book as a clash between these two kinds of ends of the spectrum, I guess. And then, of course, like most novelists begin with an idea that they can divide into two and then they end up settling with an idea that can divide into three because it ends up kind of being richer and with more scope for patterning. And so I started seeing the book at that point generationally, and realized that actually, the baby boomers effectively were the missing piece in this like, they’ve got the Gen X billionaire, the kind of overlord, the slightly complacent, shall we say, baby boomer property owners who have become just kind of vastly property rich, by just the mere fact of growing older, who were able to practice the kind of entrepreneurial realism that is kind of unthinkable today. You know, I feel such envy when I hear stories about of people from my parents’ generation talking about their university education, or they’re kind of moving into cheap neighborhoods to kind of hone their poetry. All of this, it just sounds so dreamy. It sounds like they’re talking about another century, not another generation. I mean, they are talking about another century, but another millennium, but I mean, I guess they’re talking about the millennium too. That was kind of how the Darvishes came to be created and, of course, because Macbeth, the play begins with an elevation, and that he’s promoted from thane of Glamis to thane of Cawdor, I thought it would be funny enough to begin the novel with this promotion of this local man to a kind of the Knight of the realm. And then everything kind of went from there, the book follows different points of view. So, each section embodies a different character and then hopefully kind of creates the effect of the ground constantly shifting under your feet as you’re constantly knowing a little bit more than the character whose perspective you’re in or kind of being a little bit behind the person that comes next. And so when I began the novel, I actually didn’t know that I was going to end up entering into Lady Darvish’s head. That decision came really late on in the writing. But once I was kind of in her, kind of inhabiting her, she just she was far and away my favorite character to write in this novel, she like, I just really love her in a way that’s quite different than how I love the other characters.

She was so surprising to me. She was so, I was really just expecting her to be an upper middle class, hausfrau— every single time she came back onto the page, I was like, wait a minute, who are you? This was one of the reasons I also wanted to get us sort of into the Darvish’s world and Lemoine’s world as well is I kept wondering and this goes back to your shifting ground thing because yes, the grid I was constantly shifting, and I loved puzzling out because you would drop these sorts of tiny clues if you’re paying attention. This book, the payoffs are, it’s constant. It’s absolutely, there’s a conversation that clearly happens between Tony and Sergio. And that is just a delight to read, but I kept also thinking to myself, as I was reading, who’s the biggest liar, even Lady Darvish, who I quite like, she tells herself some lies until she doesn’t. And I don’t know if I have an answer to who’s the biggest liar, but it was fun to keep thinking about that, as I went, because I didn’t really trust anyone. You know, I liked the characters, and I liked the roles they have even the characters I didn’t really like, I liked them. It was fun thinking about like, who’s the biggest problem?

I don’t actually know how I would answer that now looking back, because I’ve written three novels now. So I kind of start to see threads is quite interesting, because, you know, you don’t often notice, what are your kind of lifelong preoccupations until you take a take a beat and kind of look back. And I think that one thing that does link all of my books, they’re quite different too, professionally, but they’re all really interested in fictions, the kind of fictions that we tell and the way that those feed into the roles that we play in the end. Acts of deception, yes, but also deception by consent, kind of part by mutual consent. For example, like when you read a novel, I mean, of course, that what you what you’re reading about is not real at all, but you the reader are agreeing to be deceived, and hopefully kind of hoodwinked as well. If it’s a plot of novel, you kind of want to be outfoxed by the book. I’m very interested in that. And it’s true that in Birnam Woods everybody does kind of practice deception in some way. They use deception in their lives, sometimes in ways that serve them and sometimes in ways that don’t. I’m just thinking about Shelley actually, the first time we meet her when she decides to betray Mira, and it’s kind of awful way by sleeping with the person that she knows Mira is in love with. She’s never funnier or more attractive than right after that moment that she decides to betray a friend. There’s this decision to betray, to deceive, it kind of unlocks in her this kind of dark capability. She doesn’t ever really match, later. In that first thing with Tony, she’s just a cracker. She just, everything she says is on point and super funny, in a way, until the conversation kind of goes in a different direction. I’m kind of interested in how deceptions can make you feel more of yourself or can unlock something in in you that you didn’t know you had. Working as a screenwriter now, I quite often have to pitch for projects, you are in front of a panel of people and you’re trying to advocate for your ideas and as fluently and as well as possible. I just get dreadfully nervous in front of these meetings, before these meetings, and so it sounds kind of pathetic, but I go into the bathroom, and I look in the mirror and I just pretend that I’m somebody else. I just tell myself that I’m somebody else. I’ve just picked somebody who I admire and who’s got a lot of success as a screenwriter. And I just look in the mirror and I say, you know, you’re Aaron Sorkin today, you just go and be Aaron Sorkin in this movie or whoever it is. And it’s interesting that how much it works kind of unlocking some sort of objectivity that you can kind of step out of your subjectivity, and almost see yourself from the outside or, or at least forget about seeing yourself from the inside for a moment, you know, and that it can lead you to kind of interesting places, but it’s dangerous too.

But one of the things I love too about Birnam Wood is you do use the very classic three act structure. And yes, let’s call them each party has their sort of moment, right? We get deeper into their POV in each of these and I sort of feel like you needed that very classical structure because there’s so much happening because there’s so much knitting together and there’s a part of the metaphor, knitting together and then so much unraveling and all of this constant movement, both in people’s brains and their physical space, and their interaction with each other. It’s wild how much happens in this book. So I know obviously, we’ve talked a lot about Macbeth and Shakespeare being you know, an it’s not like you haven’t written novels before, or screenplays or anything else. But can we talk about some literary influences for a second? What else is built into Birnam Wood?

Well, I mean, the biggest influence by far is Jane Austen’s Emma, which I came to as a screenwriter. I adapted it for film a couple of years ago, about three years ago, but of course in the adaptation process I just had the chance to read it and read reread it and reread it. That is a book in three volumes. And a book that I was astonished coming back to it having learned a little bit about screenwriting structure, I was astonished by how perfectly it conforms to all of the 20th century and 21st century screenwriting wisdom, which is kind of incredible. I mean, if you think about the fact that of course, the cinema is still 100 years away when Jane Austen is writing this book, and really speaks, I think, to the fact that a three-act structure is something that, we think about it so much in terms of the movies nowadays. But really, it’s an ancient concept. I mean, it goes right back to Aristotle, saying that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. You know, that’s 123. It was my screenwriting training, I suppose, all kind of reading about screenwriting craft that got me really interested in drama and in trying to write a book that was dramatically kind of structured for maximum drama in the sense of having not just one turning point, not just one irony, but a second point where the irony was ionized. Again, kind of really trusting in the triplicate nature of change, that it’s not just enough to reverse something, you have to reverse it again, that second reversal is incredibly important. So, Jane Austen, for sure. I mean, she far and away she’s the biggest influence on the book. But in terms of other references, I read a lot of 20th century crime. I mean, James M. Cain is one of my favorite writers, and you probably wouldn’t see much of him in in the book, but yeah, I don’t know actually— he probably hasn’t influenced the book except for through my admiration.

I mean, that sort of sense of noir and dread and a little bit of paranoia. I mean, I can it felt very noir-y to me, even though I knew I was reading an eco-thriller, political satire, you know, and I really appreciate a sense of dread when I’m reading a book, it’s something I look forward to.

Patricia Highsmith was really a huge influence on me and that sense of a kind of a of feverish panic that her characters get into when they’ve just committed murder. And she makes murder seem so undesirable in this way that’s just so fun to read, this ruinous quality to the crimes in her books that I just, I just can’t get enough. I love it.

Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori just popped into my head while you were talking about Highsmith, like, it’s been a minute, since I’ve read Muriel Spark, but like, again, that’s sort of like, do I trust you? Where am I standing? What’s going on? Who are you? There’s a lot of that puzzling through…

It’s cool that you mentioned Muriel Spark, actually, I haven’t read that book. But there’s a book of essays that I have of Muriel Spark’s, and one of them is a lecture that she once gave to some group of literary people, and it’s called “The Desegregation of Art.” And it was such an important essay, a piece of writing for me, when writing Birnam Wood, she advocates the use of ridicule, and says that ridicule is kind of the one form of protest literature that is in a way capable of the magnitude of tragedy weirdly, that a lot of forms of protest literature, well, they’re kind of hearts are in the right place, can end up stalling at the place of pathos, rather than being able to kind of fully blossom into tragedy. I mean, it’s a very funny, as you would expect from Muriel Spark, it’s a very funny, kind of dry essay, but I love that piece of writing so much. It was one of those things that you read as kind of early on in a project that really gives you permission to go with your hunch, which is in my case, it was that I wanted to write a satirical novel that would eventually kind of become something else. And Muriel Spark really kind of made me feel that that was possible, you know.

And I love the fact that we’re talking about, you know, a satirical thriller that the influences include Mary Shelley, Shakespeare, Emma by Jane Austen, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and this Muriel Spark essay, which now I’m desperate to read, because I didn’t know it existed. I don’t know how I missed that. But the idea that you can pull all of these disparate pieces of art into a story that never stops. I don’t, you know, obviously, lots of things happen in Highsmith, but lots of things happen in Cain, I don’t always think of lots of things happening with Jane Austen. I think of it more as talking, talking, talking.

I would beg to defer. I mean, the thing that I love About Jane Austen more than anything is that there’s almost no point in Jane Austen where the clock stops. There’s a huge distinction in fiction writing between description and narration being two very, very different skills. And then dialogue being the kind of the third skill, which I’m taking actually from Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, really usefully divides fiction, the kind of the task or the project of fiction into those three skills. But what’s amazing about Jane Austen is the novels are almost never descriptive in the sense of just merely being descriptive for the pleasure of it. Everything is narration there’s almost no metaphors in her books, no similes, there’s just kind of no faffing around. Even when she’s inside a character’s head, everything is advancing time and some way the clock is ticking. You know, I love that about her. And I really wanted to emulate that in Birnam Woods, I think that there are a couple of similies in the book, but there are similes that are within that character’s vocabulary that they aren’t similes that I would kind of impose on the book.

I know what you’re referring to, but we’re not going to spoil it here. I know, I know exactly what you’re talking about. But I love the idea, too, that you just described a novel by Jane Austen is something that the clock is ticking. Just I love that. No, it’s absolutely true. But I mean, you’re absolutely right, you’re absolutely, absolutely right, that her sense of pacing is extraordinary. And this book, you have multiple storylines happening. And people who need to dip in and out, there’s some supporting characters that we meet, you know, in a couple of different ways. There’s a giant acid trip, which made me laugh because I was like, really acid, okay. But it worked. I mean, it absolutely it works in the context, like every piece of this book, slots in, in a really organic, pleasurable way, even though, like we’re really talking about some, I mean, I realized we’ve been laughing a lot in this conversation, people are gonna think, what is going on perhaps when they pick up Birnam Woods, but the idea that you can enjoy reading about hard things, because the art itself is pleasurable, a difficult subject doesn’t take away from the art. And in fact, you know, maybe the art elevates it, maybe the subject elevates the art, I don’t really know. But I want people to be able to sit with this book and experience it because you do so much.

I guess what I’d say to the kind of the general point about the kind of the clock ticking and that kind of thing is that I think that social media has really changed our relationship with time, I hate calling it a platform, because I think that that’s a propaganda term that suggests a kind of a featureless space, which, you know, the only purpose of which is to elevate and kind of amplify and it has no other purpose, which is just obviously ridiculous. But anyway, these social media environments, it’s called a timeline. So, they’re presented as though things have happened in real time. But really, there are none of the responsibilities that are on a person who’s really truly in a room with somebody having an actual conversation with somebody where the clock is ticking, and you know, time is passing. None of those responsibilities are brought to bear on what’s happening on social media. It’s very disjointed you can reach back into the past if you want and delete something that maybe made you look stupid. I mean, we can’t do that in real life. If I can’t do that, in this conversation with you, you know, I can’t reach back I’ve already said it, I feel it in myself, I kind of a great nostalgia for a kind of a great longing for in social interactions that are more human because they’re more rooted in time. They kind of take place in time. That was very important to me. When I was writing Birnam Wood, I wanted it to be a book that kind of relentlessly pulled you forward where you were, you’re wanting to know what, what happened to the characters, because you knew a little bit more than they do early on, one of the characters manages to compromise another character’s phone. And so, you know that from then on that every time she uses her phone, you are hoping in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, Oh, no, somebody else is listening. And somebody else is somebody else can see that, though. Of course, she can’t see that. I’m sure. She doesn’t know that. That’s one of the pleasures of the novel really, because it’s a time bound object. It plays with time, and it is concerned with time in a way that poetry isn’t, in the same way that film isn’t except for it taking place in a finite amount of the viewers time, which is quite different than a novel. In a novel, you control the speed, in a sense because you can reread and read faster, read slower, which you can’t do with the film.

Is this going to be adapted? Are you going to adapt Birnam Wood as you did with The Luminaries?

Yeah, I’m open to the idea, it’s so nice to have something that’s just kind of in the form in which it was intended. And adaptation is endlessly fascinating, but there are so many concessions that you have to make, there are so many accommodations, you know, not to other people, necessarily, but just to life, just because of the screen and the length of the hour and, and all of that kind of thing. Whereas you can be so dictatorial as a novelist. I’m enjoying that feeling for the moment.

I really enjoyed reading it. I just, there are moments in the book, that are so obviously cinematic, because it fits the story, not because, you know, there’s another endpoint, it’s just, it’s the way the story unfolds. And I’m just sort of curious how that translate when you have to strip out the interiority of your characters, because again, part of the pleasure of this book is digging around in these people’s heads and knowing what they don’t know. I mean, it’s the worst kind of eavesdropping, or the best kind of eavesdropping. But the idea that that gets stripped out, and you have to represent it with a visual, instead of and that sometimes I find that tricky as a reader that there are times where I don’t actually want to see someone else’s interpretation of a story on the screen that I would just like to sit with what I think these characters look like.

I feel like that about some stories too. I find it’s very personal thing. But then then other things, you know, it’s so enriched by being able to see a wonderfully good-looking actor and enjoy the company for a while.

As much art as we can have, can we just have all of the art, I think that’s really what I’m arguing for is like, let’s have all of the art and all the forms. And maybe not everything has every form. I mean, maybe some things just sit as they are kind of thing. And we’ll see what happens. Do you miss these characters? Do you miss this world that you created— because it’s very intense.

Not really, no, I don’t actually. But that’s just because I still feel very close to it, you know, publication and talking about it a lot at the moment and reading from it for the first time and encountering people who are reading it for the first time. It’s a funny thing to write a novel, I wrote pretty much all of this book during the lockdowns, I only really started working on it in earnest in 2020. I was pregnant at the time and then after that, I had a little baby and then a toddler running about while I was finishing it. This is a book kind of more than any other that feels so much a product of my immediate domestic environment, which is very contained. And we just didn’t see anybody for a couple of years, like many, many, many people didn’t, of course, but in my case, I was living in the United Kingdom with my husband, and then my daughter, and we didn’t have any family nearby, and it was just us, we were just this little unit. So, it kind of feels extra strange for the book to be now out in the world. Because these, it almost feels like these characters were a part of my marriage, you know, kind of a part of my, my home life for such a long time. Another common property, and it’s, it’s nice, but it also feels kind of weirdly disembodied, because there’s something so intimate about how this book kind of came about.

It’s so interesting to hear you describe this sort of epic political novel, I’m enjoying listening to all of the influences that made this really sort of riotous story, and, you know, people’s egos colliding and all of this, and it just all of these different story elements came together. The first time I read the book, I whizzed through it, because I just could not put it to end the second time. Obviously, it’s you’re reading for plot, you know, you’re just reading to prep for an interview and that’s a totally different set of, I got to experience two different ways and it’s so satisfying.

I’m so pleased to hear that. That really was one of the things that I always say about the different voices about Emma,Jane Austen’s Emma, is that it’s a book that only gets better with each rereading. You know, it has been called the first ever detective novel, where you have to play the role of the detective. And of course, you’ve totally missed that that’s your role the first time that you read it. Then the second time you see that she’s planted all these clues, and she’s having all sorts of fun at your expense, kind of all the way through and then kind of the third and fourth times your admiration just grows and grows. So that’s a huge compliment.

There’s a lot in Birnam Wood. I’m so glad we had a chance to chat. This was so much fun, but I knew this was going to happen to– we’ve hit time. Eleanor Catton thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, Birnam Wood is out now, if you haven’t read The Luminaries, it’s 863 fabulous pages. Go to Birnam Wood first.

Thank you so much. I’ve had a lot of fun.