Harare Review of Books

432 pages.

First published on Mar 7, 2023 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fiction/thriller.

What?!

I went to bed upset by this book, I woke up upset, and I’m still fuming—in the best way.

We have a guerilla gardening group, the kind that’s mostly harmless and that would just be called gardeners (or maybe farmers) in the world they call the Third. We have a scheming billionaire, who wants what all billionaires want: more $$$. And then we have the hapless farmer and his wife who have land in an area the billionaire is interested in, abutting a national park in New Zealand—which is where the three sets of characters intersect.

I mean, I take my hat off to Catton for the form she used to entrap me. The first 64% of the book honestly feels like a really long run-on sentence, like Virginia Woolf’s famous “invention”, stream-of-consciousness, or like Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss (which is a good intimation, btw)—in other words, you’re just getting basic monologues of the characters’ thoughts. Also actual monologues. I was at about three stars out of five up to that point; like, sure, good, mindless literary fiction, let’s enjoy all of the many words (except, I was thinking to myself I know I’ve been exposed to too many romance book blurbs because I truly didn’t expect the billionaire to be an actual baddie in the bad sense of the word, in spite of the hint in the very name of the book). At 65%, Catton decided to switch up on me, and I couldn’t put the book down anymore.

I remember struggling through the 848 pages of The Luminaries, wondering if I could stick around long enough for things to get going; and at first I really thought I was about to have the same experience with Birnam Wood. I am happy to report that this is satisfyingly, emphatically not what happened. I cannot shout more loudly about the horror of what Catton does to the characters, and to us her poor readers. I imagine her chortling as she writes the first two thirds of the book, delighting in how she’s about to bring down the sky on all of us. Because that, dear Reader, is what happens in the rest of the book.

So, if you want to read a chew-your-nails-off thriller this year, this is it. This is your book. 5/5 stars.

Oh, and the Macbeth reference? Yes.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this very fun (in the end) ARC.

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