“Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him”.

Birnam Wood is both a reference to Macbeth and the appropriated name of an activist gardening collective in New Zealand, the brainchild of Mira Bunting. On paper Birnam Wood plants food crops on unused land, or in gardens where owners give permission in exchange for the portions of the produce. The rest is distributed to those in need or sold to cover their expenses. Birnam Wood also has some Guerilla activites off the books where they maintain crops on median strips, abandon lots, and other hidden parcels which they struggle to maintain.

The group epitomizes a politically correct horizontal organization. Rotating directors lead caucuses at the quarterly “hui’s” (Maori word for “gathering”) where everyone votes on all management issues related to the group, and all financial records are kept on shared documents with total transparency. In spite of this Mira is the unspoken leader and her decisions shape the direction of the group. The novel begins with Mira reading about an abandon property which was taken off the market when a landslide cut off the main access to it and the remote town of Thorndike at the foothills of the Korowai ranges. Mira, Seong opportunity to upscale the organization, journeys 5 hours to Thorndike, treks through the woods around the landslide, and sneaks onto the property. But her reconnaissance is interrupted by a man in an expensive track suit, the billionaire Robert Lemoine.

Mira learns that Lemoine had been in negotiation with the property owner Owen Darvish prior to the landslide. After an initial intimidating encounter, he offers her $10,000 to help Birnam Wood set up operations in Thorndike. He tells her he is a prepper and is buying the property to embed a doomsday bunker in the land. Although he does not yet own the property, Darvish has invited him to use the house and use its airfield for his private plane. He convinces Mira that he will be ultimately purchasing the property and that they both might trespass together.

Meanwhile Tony Gallo, one of the founding members of Birnam Wood and a former (somewhat fraught) fling of Mira’s shows up at Mira’s house unannounced. Mira is on her way to her fact-finding mission in Thorndike, so Tony instead talks with Mira’s roommate and Birnam Wood co-director Shelley. We learn that Shelley is disaffected with the organization and trying to figure out her exit strategy. She thinks a one-night stand with Tony might give her the out she needs so the two of them head out for drinks. But the evening ends badly when Shelley realizes Tony is still interested in Mira.

So it is that Tony arrives at the next Birnam hui, hackles raised. First he gets into a loud debate with Amber, the owner of the cafe who hosts the hui, and who feeds the group using (of course) vegetables grown by Birnam Wood. The discussion, which seems to be a parody of me-too one-up-manship ends in Tony arguing that “Polyamory is so fucking capitalistic. Yet again. you’re proving my point. You literally couldn’t have picked a more individualistic example.” Amber looked confused. “What?” “It’s Consumerism 101!” Tony burst out. “It’s like going to a department store! The idea that this partner gives you a little bit of this and this partner gives you a little bit of that, and you don’t want to risk missing out, so you buy them both – it’s a hedge!“

The “caucus” has turned against Tony when Mira suddenly walks in late, excited about her news of Thorndike, and is confronted by the appearance of Tony who she hasn’t seen in years, and the hostile vibe in the room. Mira pushes forward her presentation of the project, not telling the group that Lemoine doesn’t actually own the property. Tony immediately objects, saying that Lemoine and his Autonomo surveillance technology company represents the opposite of their values. A heated debate ensues and Tony ends up being asked to leave. The rest of the group vote in favor of Thorndike and begin to mobilize the move.

Catton constantly shifts perspective in her narrative style and the reader is thrust from one first person narrative to the next with little warning. The first half of the book which I have summarized above took me some time to engage with, as we are introduced to so many characters with their extreme value systems. But as Birnam moves to Thorndike, and we learn more and more about Lemoine’s sinister maneuvering, we can see the conflict taking shape long before it happens, and wonder why none of the other characters can.

So it is that we learn Lemoine has hacked Mira’s cell phone and can now track, interrupt, and modify all her calls texts and emails. Her moves are further tracked by the Automono Surveillance drones which monitor the property. Lemoine, as the reader may have expected, is a billionaire on a mission, which has nothing to do with doomsday. His discovery of rare earth metals used for computer chips and cell phones in the Korowai ranges has prompted an extreme and secretive plan for extracting them. He has no intention of living in his doomsday bunker, but instead of filling it up with the extracted minerals he is illegally mining from the adjacent national park, and then secreting the product out of the country in the bunker. It is unclear to the reader, and perhaps even to Lemoine, how his support of Birnam Wood will play into his plans, which seem very fluid and have layers and layers of redundancy.

But when the Birnam Wood collective sets up camp in Thorndike, Tony starts to research the activities of Lemoine. Up to this point, Tony has seemed just an intellectual with few social skills, but he now demonstrates his extreme survival skills and ability to avoid the surveillance state. Sneaking behind the Darvish farm up in the hills of the Korowai range, he stays off the main path, keeps his phone in an aluminum pouch, and soon discovers Lemoine’s secret extraction site. The hapless Tony is able to avoid the guards, the surveillance drones, and Lemoine’s increasingly aggressive efforts to capture him.

But it is Mira’s failure to heed his warnings that ironically leads to his downfall. Not knowing (or believing) that her phone has already been compromised, she comes out at night to find Tony, immediately leading Lemoine to his hiding place.

If the lesson of Macbeth is the destruction wrought by unconstrained ambition, it seems none of these characters will escape their fate. Tony is blinded by his visions of fame and glory for revealing the sinister plot to harvest precious metals from National parkland. Mira’s vision of a vital Birnam Wood collective blinds her to Lemoine’s manipulations. Lemoine is the classic victim of wealth and power. Thus the ending – which seemed so abrupt – should have been foreseen, and in fact Catton makes no effort to hide the details. Nonetheless my first reaction was to look on line for a potential sequel – apparently I too willfully ignored all the clues.

I give this book 4.9👍 out of 5👍.