Laith
My god does this book sneak up on you. I’ve heard people describe it as a thriller, or a tragedy, but I think they’ve got it wrong — this is horror, plain and simple. Not cheap horror either; this is slow-burn dread buried in technological distrust, the mechanics and foreshadowing ingeniously concealed in all too mundane complaints about modern life: corrosive internet culture, billionaires, mass surveillance. It all builds to a sudden moment that flips your perception of every character on its head and furnishes one of the blackest endings I have ever read.
The real star of this show is Robert Lemoine. He’s so inconspicuous, so little of his interior life revealed to the reader compared to the others, that he just slips under your radar. Sure, he’s a little creepy from the start — the drones, the surveillance — but we are so accustomed to the impression of the ineffective, undeserving billionaire that we write him and his cartoon villainy off as just another obnoxious caricature. Somewhere along the line, though, you begin to realize that he is not an obnoxious caricature, that he did not stumble into money, and that he is instead cut from a more sinister cloth: the high-functioning sociopath. Once you realize he’s the only character actually playing the game, his every prior action becomes laced with sinister intention, and you begin frantically recontextualising everything — characters you’ve spent the whole book rooting against you are now desperately hoping will succeed.
The book follows Mira and Shelley, two leaders of the titular Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that grows crops on vacant land, scrounging and sometimes stealing what they need. Mira identifies an opportunity to bring the group into solvency: a landslide in southern New Zealand has cut off the town of Thorndike, leaving a large farm abandoned. But Lemoine has his eyes on the property too, hoping to buy it for an apocalypse bunker, and when he catches Mira scoping the farm he offers her funding and use of the land.
A significant portion of the book is spent familiarising us with the Birnam Wood cadre: Mira, the charismatic but unappreciative leader; Shelley, a disgruntled functionary who wants to leave but won’t confront Mira about it; and Tony, the self-righteous founder who returns from abroad to find himself alienated from the group. Each is a purposely grating caricature of a self-absorbed, liberal-minded eco-warrior. You’d be forgiven for putting the book down at the midway point — by then you’ll be thoroughly fed up with these unpleasant characters and the heavy-handed social commentary they spew. But that irritation is precisely the point. They are the cover.
The last quarter of the book is blindingly incandescent and impossible to put down, in the vein of Fargo + The Beast in Me — a slow, dreadful burn culminating in an absolutely unhinged finale. My only caveat (and it's a fairly major one) is that it takes a long time to get there; I really had to slog through the first 50–60% of the novel. If you choose to read Birnam Wood, please do not put it down halfway. That’s all I can say.
My god does this book sneak up on you. I’ve heard people describe it as a thriller, or a tragedy, but I think they’ve got it wrong — this is horror, plain and simple. Not cheap horror either; this is slow-burn dread buried in technological distrust, the mechanics and foreshadowing ingeniously concealed in all too mundane complaints about modern life: corrosive internet culture, billionaires, mass surveillance. It all builds to a sudden moment that flips your perception of every character on its head and furnishes one of the blackest endings I have ever read.
The real star of this show is Robert Lemoine. He’s so inconspicuous, so little of his interior life revealed to the reader compared to the others, that he just slips under your radar. Sure, he’s a little creepy from the start — the drones, the surveillance — but we are so accustomed to the impression of the ineffective, undeserving billionaire that we write him and his cartoon villainy off as just another obnoxious caricature. Somewhere along the line, though, you begin to realize that he is not an obnoxious caricature, that he did not stumble into money, and that he is instead cut from a more sinister cloth: the high-functioning sociopath. Once you realize he’s the only character actually playing the game, his every prior action becomes laced with sinister intention, and you begin frantically recontextualising everything — characters you’ve spent the whole book rooting against you are now desperately hoping will succeed.
The book follows Mira and Shelley, two leaders of the titular Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that grows crops on vacant land, scrounging and sometimes stealing what they need. Mira identifies an opportunity to bring the group into solvency: a landslide in southern New Zealand has cut off the town of Thorndike, leaving a large farm abandoned. But Lemoine has his eyes on the property too, hoping to buy it for an apocalypse bunker, and when he catches Mira scoping the farm he offers her funding and use of the land.
A significant portion of the book is spent familiarising us with the Birnam Wood cadre: Mira, the charismatic but unappreciative leader; Shelley, a disgruntled functionary who wants to leave but won’t confront Mira about it; and Tony, the self-righteous founder who returns from abroad to find himself alienated from the group. Each is a purposely grating caricature of a self-absorbed, liberal-minded eco-warrior. You’d be forgiven for putting the book down at the midway point — by then you’ll be thoroughly fed up with these unpleasant characters and the heavy-handed social commentary they spew. But that irritation is precisely the point. They are the cover.
The last quarter of the book is blindingly incandescent and impossible to put down, in the vein of Fargo + The Beast in Me — a slow, dreadful burn culminating in an absolutely unhinged finale. My only caveat (and it's a fairly major one) is that it takes a long time to get there; I really had to slog through the first 50–60% of the novel. If you choose to read Birnam Wood, please do not put it down halfway. That’s all I can say.
