Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton · 2023
A guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand encounters a tech billionaire, and the collision becomes a thriller about ideology, surveillance capitalism, and the seductions of power. Catton returns after *The Luminaries* with something more explicitly political and more urgent.
The case against
Catton spends her first half inside characters auditing their own politics, paragraphs of self-justifying interior monologue while the plot idles. Then the thriller arrives all at once: the billionaire is a cartoon, coincidence does heavy lifting, and the ending detonates into a body count so abrupt it reads less like tragedy than like the author burning the set down.
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