Birnam Wood (5*)

I fell in love with this au courant environmental thriller when Jill Darvish, whose husband recently has been knighted,  can't find "Lady"on the prefix menu while she's making an online reservation and screams "fuck" in frustration.  Yet her momentary pretension doesn't get in the way of grabbing a rifle when necessary.  Eleanor  Catton--a Kiwi Jonathan Franzen--fully rounds out the half-dozen characters who propel Birnam Wood to its disastrous, foregone conclusion with similarly astute psychological detail.  Here's the deeply flawed protagonist, who leads a guerrilla group that harvests food from private land:

Like all self-mythologising 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.

In other words, a true believer, as opposed to a charisma-challenged follower like Shelley, her disgruntled second lieutenant.  Their toxic friendship provides the scaffolding for a novel that finds the good and bad in everybody, and which also recognizes the joy that can be found in communal living.  This passage, reminded me of a night 30 years ago in the Pines, when inhabitants of the house I shared spontaneously began singing "A Little Respect" while cleaning up after a group meal.

At Birnam Wood they would have welcomed the rain. He imagined them spreading tarpaulins in the fields, weighting the middles and staking down the corners so the canvas wouldn’t fly away, perhaps setting out rainwater butts under drainpipes, and fashioning catchments in run-off ditches beside the road, and then piling back into Mira’s van, drenched and laughing, to drive back to the shearing shed where they’d set up their base of operations; he imagined them stringing a clothesline among the ancient wooden chutes to hang their wet jackets up to dry, and he conjured in his mind a lofted space beyond the chutes where, in a happy hubbub of cross-pollinating chatter, they would all gather round to help prepare the evening meal, chopping vegetables for curry, and washing rice, and rolling out chapatis with an empty wine bottle dusted with flour, and someone would be strumming a guitar, or reading out Listener crossword clues, or narrating the gist of some recent article that had done the rounds online, and someone would be making an inventory of their progress to date, or delegating tasks for the coming day, or labelling seed sets for planting, and someone would be knitting, and someone would be poking irrigation holes in the bottoms of empty yogurt pots with a heated needle, and from time to time a snatch of melody from the guitar would cut through their conversation and they would all sing along in unison for a phrase or two – and then dissolve into embarrassed laughter, for at Birnam Wood such instances of unprompted and unaffected concord were always followed, Tony remembered, by a discomfiting self-consciousness, for a moment everybody feeling, squeamishly, just a tiny bit like members of a cult.

We never felt like members of a cult, of course, just a very privileged ghetto where the threat of climate change had barely begun to be understood and when the internet and mining of precious metals had not turned the world into a nightmare scenario.  Catton clearly understands what has been lost in the 21st century, during the toxic bloom of late stage capitalism, and Birnam Wood leaves her readers even more bereft than its titular allusion to Macbeth would suggest.