Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a strange amalgam of a book. For the first two thirds it meanders slowly along without seeming to be getting anywhere particularly significant – and then, as if it has been injected with some illicit substance, suddenly speeds up and turns into ‘a thriller’ with an ending that has more dead bodies in it than Hamlet.
All of which is vaguely ridiculous.
For me, the two parts don’t coalesce happily, and the final section is pure Hollywood unreality. Maybe it was written with a film in mind. Indeed, it was almost as if it had been glued together by two different people. “Will the real Eleanor Catton please stand up.”
I loved Catton’s The Luminaries, which I think worked far better as a book than on the screen; Birnam Wood feels designed the other way round, and I can’t help but wonder whether the end-product wasn’t what Catton originally intended… I imagine her being negatively influenced by Agents / Publishers to produce something that would be a far easier sell in Tinsel Town.
Ian Gouge - Writer 