THE PERFORMANCE ANXIETY for a big literary prize winner — the “follow that!” factor — must be greater still if you are a record holder like Eleanor Catton, who was just 28 when she became the youngest ever winner of the Booker Prize with The Luminaries. Why her new novel, Birnam Wood, took a decade to write (in the acknowledgements she thanks her “very patient agent”) we cannot say, but struggles in composition are suggested by the fault lines that run through it.
As the -sourced title suggests, the novel is about a “wood that moves” — Birnam Wood, an ecological campaign group in modern New Zealand that plants crops on other people’s land to promote self-sufficiency. Heading the group is Mira Bunting and her friend Shelley, and as the book opens they are excited by the opportunities for some guerrilla gardening presented by a landslide which has cut off a local farm owned by pest control magnate Sir
