Saturday, 7 December 2024

Birnham Wood

Wow was the word I used when I reviewed 'The Luminaries' by Eleanor Catton a decade ago(!), and my response to 'Birnham Wood' is the same. You know you are on to a good thing when you have to get up at 4.30am but you know there's no point trying to 'leave it there' and get some sleep. 

The story revolves around Mira and Shelley who are the driving forces of a guerrilla gardening organisation, Birnham Wood, that cultivates neglected plots of land to provide food to sell and give away. When a landslide hits the news Mira learns of a neglected farm nearby and sees it as an opportunity for a larger project. While scouting the area she meets Robert Lemoine, a tech billionaire, who is buying the land, ostensibly for an end-of-the-world bunker, but more sinister motives are also at play. With funding from Lemoine a group of people move on to the farm to start planting. Meanwhile, former Birnham member (and Mira's some time love interest) Tony has become suspicious of Lemoine's motives and travels to the site to investigate. Add a trojan horse computer programme, high tech surveillance drones and some LSD into the mix and you get a denouement that was not going to let me go to sleep. 

Just like last time it is the cast of characters as well as the plot that truly carries this novel. The slightly fraught and unequal relationship between Mira and Shelley, and then you have this neat little aside of Jill and Owen Darvish (who own the farm), their relationship painted in quite a bit of detail even though they seem peripheral to the story, but they then become the driving force of the crisis. But it is the portrayal of Lemoine that is most wonderful. Everyone is so deferential to him, overawed by the money, and the power that accompanies it. And he is so wonderfully psychopathic; you watch him charm everyone, playing them off against each other, manipulating people, and you watch him fuck them over for his own ends. You see his utter disregard for other human beings, as if they are merely ants for him to squash. It's wonderful to have a character to hate. 

So here is the setup, doing good for the community and making the world a better place, but...

"And they did more than trespass. Their plantings occasionally choked out local competition, or became so prolific as to be expensive to remove; sometimes, they returned to a site to find it had been doused in weedkiller or burned. They took cuttings from suburban gardens, leaf litter out of public parks, and manure from farmland. Mira had stolen scions from commercial apple orchards - budding whips of Braeburn and Royal Gala that she grafted to the stocks of sour crab-apple trees - and equipment out of unlocked garden sheds, though only, she insisted, in wealthy neighbourhoods, and only those tools that did not seem to be in frequent use. But she prized her freedom too highly ever to risk it very far, and she was careful to conceal any potential criminal activity from the wider membership of Birnham Wood, whose good opinion she was anxious to retain. That, Shelley thought, as she forked the compost and released the sweet vegetal stink into the air, had been her most valuable contribution to the group, over the years; through the sheer unlikelihood of her allegiance, she gave Mira the only kind of credibility she lacked: the ordinary. In playing the supporting role not as a disciple or a fanatic, but as a foil, she not only tempered Mira's image, she ensured - and she had ensured - that the hidden face of Birnham Wood stayed underground." (p.23)

And then, in retrospect, all sorts of hints in this quote:

"Mira knew that a large proportion of the world's billionaires were psychopaths, and she also knew that one defining feature of psychopathy was a tendency to lie. It was possible that Lemoine had never even met the Darvishes. Maybe he was trespassing as well. Maybe he wanted to acquire Birnham Wood in order to destroy it - or maybe he was looking for a loss to write off against his taxes; maybe his whole intention was to run them into the ground. Or maybe he'd never intended to invest in them at all. He might have dangled his offer only as a lure - or he might be grooming her for something else entirely - or he might be trying to frame her - or he might be simply toying with her as a joke. He might be sick in the head. He might be planning to kill her. He might be planning to kill the whole group. Mira tried her best to scold herself, but even at her sternest, she could never quite repress the knowledge that the only person who she knew for sure had lied to Birnham Wood about the Darvish farm was her." (p.188)

And just a little taster of the action:

"He was keeping his phone angled away from her, but Mira could see it in the dark reflection of the glass, and she realised that he had opened an app that gave him bird's-eye perspective on the farm - a live feed, it seemed like. Somehow, it had never occurred to her that he might be keeping the farm under surveillance; she opened her mouth to say something, but she was distracted when he scrolled past something that was moving ... and then in the next instant she heard the roar of an engine revving painfully in a low gear. Stupidly, she looked down at the SUV at the gate, but it was stationary, its windows still dark - and then, before she had time to speak, the Vanette came careening past the house and down the hill." (p.273)

It was so wonderful to read a book and be completely gripped by it. So well plotted, so well researched. And, of course, a picture of what is actually going on in the world; the dichotomy between people (with very little) trying hard to make a difference versus people (who already have everything) who just take at any cost. It makes you look at the philanthropy of the very wealthy and feel very suspicious.

Stay safe. Be kind.