60 pages • 2 hours read
Eleanor CattonBirnam Wood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Ambition as the Root of All Evil
Eleanor Catton cites Macbeth as a major influence on Birnam Wood, and this influence is most apparent in her thematic treatment of ambition and subsequent betrayals Just as Macbeth betrays and murders everyone between him and the throne, each character in Birnam Wood betrays either another person or their own ideals on their ambitious quest for their version of power.
Catton uses this theme to cast a comparison between Shelley and Lady Darvish. Shelley’s declaration that she will sleep with Tony and Lady Darvish’s cozy confiding are equally self-serving, and Catton presents their ambition as the original sin. Shelley and Lady Darvish both betray another person to gain what they see as position and power. For Shelley, it begins with wanting to leave Birnam Wood, but actualizes in her desire for power and position over Mira, who has always eclipsed her. Lady Darvish’s frustrated revelation of the farm’s sale when her friends don’t properly acknowledge her husband’s knighthood reveals that her desire is essentially the same as Shelley’s: Both are concerned with how they’re seen, and both take steps to ensure that they get the respect they want.
Likewise, Catton compares Tony and Sir Owen’s ambition. Tony lets his ambitions of being a lauded journalist cloud his otherwise strict morality. He acknowledges that his story will betray and deceive his old friends, so he decides not to do it “to their faces” (142). Sir Owen sells off his land and ambitiously fakes interest in the environment, thus becoming a celebrated citizen of his country. Like Tony, it doesn’t bother him that the basis of his fame is deception.
Mira’s outsized ambitions cause her to betray her peers and her ideals; when Lemoine accuses her of wanting to be powerful, like god, she doesn’t deny it. Early on, she compromises her ideals by joining with Lemoine in an ambitious exchange for money, and by the end she fully intends to betray everyone by telling the public about Sir Owen’s death. Catton makes Mira’s ambition directly proportional to the danger in which she finds herself; as her ambition wanes, her escape seems possible, yet as her ambition returns, she is caught again.
Lemoine is the novel’s example of what happens when someone’s ambitions for money and power are fulfilled. Like Macbeth in the story, he becomes paranoid and obsessed with his power, and like Macbeth, he feels momentarily invincible and doesn’t see a little grass-roots organization like Birnam Wood being his demise.
All characters commit a greater ecological betrayal fed by their ambitions to use the earth as a means to power. The Darvishes lie about caring for the environment to achieve their status and title. Lemoine destroys the earth while pretending to prepare for the apocalyptic end that he’s helping to perpetuate, and though Tony takes the brunt of the earth’s counter-attack, he sets fire to the forest in a last ambitious attempt to get his message out.
In keeping with the structure of Shakespearean tragedy (derived from Greek tragedy), everyone who sins must die. Despite the differences in betrayals, all the characters in Birnam Wood have ambition for power that becomes the basis of the novel’s evils. The tragic novel concludes, conventionally, in fire and death.
Compromising Morality in Service to a Cause
Through the mission of Birnam Wood and the plans of the Darvishes, Catton explores the way characters justify bad behavior if it helps to achieve a higher purpose. In this novel, the results of such actions destroy the characters and the cause that they are so fervently pursuing.
Mira lives in a world of ideas, allowing her to blur moral lines as long as they serve Birnam Wood. To her, stealing, lying, and not paying bills are negligible compared to the larger good that Mira believes that Birnam Wood can enact. These small compromises of morality add up, however, and make possible the larger scale of betrayal concerning the entire organization as well as Mira’s compromising her personal moral values to save herself.
In contrast, Tony takes the hardest line on this matter, arguing that settling on anything is selling out. Catton uses him to voice the moral concerns surrounding Lemoine and hence make this theme explicit. However, he’s willing to compromise his morals in service to the cause of his career and fame.
Shelley is more hardline in that she refuses to compromise and simply throws morality out. She knows the rules of society and morality. At first, her more practical work for Birnam Wood requires her to follow guidelines to be successful; she also can’t pull off lying to people like Mira whenever they are caught trespassing. Shelley knows what she’s doing, and so her amoral behavior in pursuit of power is doubly indicative of her character development later in the novel, such as when she feels no guilt about killing Owen Darvish because this action can be twisted around to fall back on Mira. While Shelley begins the novel having already considered and occasionally compromised her morality for years, she later disregards moral considerations altogether, reinforcing the question of whether she is the creator of Frankenstein or the created.
The Darvishes want to be seen as successful citizens and a strong working unit, so money and prestige is the ultimate cause for which they are working. Their moral compromises come in the form of welcoming Lemoine despite what he proposes to do to their land and country, and Lady Darvish laments too late that they knew that he was evil. They go to extremes of moral compromise, such as accepting a knighthood based on a lie and betraying one’s spouse by offering a better deal behind the others’ back.
No character is rewarded for moral compromise in the novel, regardless of whether their cause is environmental or financial. Catton drives the tragedy forward with each moral compromise, suggesting that no cause is served without a moral foundation.
The Dangerous Proliferation of Technology in the Modern World
Technology has an antagonistic quality in Birnam Wood as it frequently puts characters in danger and spirals out of control. From the very first sentence, the internet, phones, and surveillance are used non-stop. The internet is most characters’ go-to method of finding information, and it’s not an accident that most of the conclusions gleaned from this research turn out to be incomplete or wrong. Misjudging and misinterpreting technological information ends with disastrous consequences, the inciting example being Mira’s assumption that the Darvish land is vacant. The most accurate information, in contrast, comes from real-life sources. The description of the Darvishes from the cook in the diner (he’s “a load and shit” and “she’s good people”) is the most discerning assessment in the novel (168).
Catton portrays cellphone use to address this theme. They’re used for everything, including predation. The ease with which Lemoine controls Mira’s phone and then uses her information to manipulate her invokes horror for the reader every time Mira picks up her device; this is a characteristic example of dramatic irony that Catton uses to build tension in the novel. That Lemoine’s business is technical surveillance is no accident. While it’s used on the surface for good, Lemoine uses it for more insidious purposes. Catton hence portrays the potential dangers of surveillance culture as a whole.
By giving Lemoine an unsettling soliloquy about how he will never go away, and depicting him holding a cellphone aloft as he dies, Catton relates this theme to the novel’s main antagonistic force. Lemoine believes:
[S]o long as there was a phone in everybody’s pocket, so long as there was a screen in front of every face, so long as there were batteries and satellites and cameras and GPS, so long as there was avarice, so long as there was loneliness and envy and ambition and boredom and addiction, he, Lemoine would be untouchable (399).
Catton hence connects a list of technology to a list of negative qualities—each tellingly similar to one of the seven deadly sins—to end the novel with an explicit warning about the dangers of technology.
Evil Hides in Plain Sight
Throughout the novel, the most overt evil is the most easily ignored or misinterpreted. Building toward the final tragedy, Catton explores the willful ignorance that stems from ambition, which ultimately allows evil to flourish in plain sight.
As the antagonist, Lemoine is the prime example. He does nothing to hide his evil nature and actively encourages people to see it. He knows expectations of eccentric billionaires and uses them to obscure his nefarious actions. He likewise doesn’t hide from Mira, telling her his strategy, confident that she won’t believe anything other than what she’s already decided is the truth. Similarly, Tony sees the mining with his own eyes and does not believe that it’s Lemoine, having already made up his mind it’s the government. The Darvishes see that Lemoine has evil intentions but do business anyway. The entire group of Birnam Wood also are guilty of ignoring the evil. When Mira presents the opportunity, she’s surprised that no one questions what seems to her to raise “like, twenty-five red flags” (116). Just as Macbeth ignores open-source information, characters in Birnam Wood (often willfully) misinterpret or ignore what is before their eyes.
The characters in Birnam Wood are willfully ignorant of evil if it benefits them. They want Lemoine’s power and money, and so when they see the evil and look away, their ambition convincing them to compromise their morals to get what they think they want. Catton’s thematic treatment of evil makes Birnam Wood deviate from the conventions of a thriller. Rather than build suspense toward an antagonist being identified, the antagonistic forces are clear to the reader throughout the novel. This theme hence makes the novel a more psychological thriller in which the characters’ relationship with overt evil, embodied by Lemoine, drives the plot.
