Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

First published in Great Britain in 2023; published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 7, 2023

Is there something subversive about planting vegetables on property owned by other people? Birnam Wood is an anti-capitalist cooperative in New Zealand, a “grassroots community initiative” to plant “sustainable organic gardens in neglected spaces” while fostering “a commitment to help those in need.” Some of the planting is done openly. Other times it is clandestine. I’m not sure most people would care if “guerilla plantings” resulted in vegetables growing alongside highway off ramps or in junkyards. As social change organizations go, Birnam Wood is even more of a yawner than most. Still, the plant activists seem to have righteous intentions, so good on them.

Mira Bunting has spent many “lost years” working with Birnam Wood, perhaps in the hope that she will demonstrate organizational skills that might appeal to an employer. Shelley Noakes is a more natural manager but she is tired of the group’s “suffocating moral censure.” She would like to get out or Birnam Wood. More importantly, she would like to get out of her relationship with Mira, who fails to treat her with the love and respect that Shelley believes to be her due.

Mira is planting secret vegetables on land near a National Park owned by Owen Darvish when she spots a small airplane on a private landing strip. The pilot is Robert Lemoine, a billionaire who made a fortune from drones. Lemoine explains to Mira that he’s buying the land from Darvish so he can install a survivalist bunker in which he can wait out whatever environmental catastrophe will first arrive. Mira justifies her trespass by telling Lemoine about Birnam Wood. He seems taken with the idea, or perhaps with Mira, and agrees to provide preliminary funding so that the organization can expand. The reader soon learns of Lemoine's hidden agenda.

A founding member who has been traveling, Tony Gallo, makes an unexpected appearance at the latest Birnam Wood meeting. Tony once had a thing with Mira. Tony doesn’t get along with Shelley. He’s “increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge.” Tony was doing personal journalism until he was accused of writing an essay that amounted to poverty tourism and revealed his white privilege. Now Tony is looking for a way back into journalism without becoming an actual journalist. To do that, he needs to do the kind of investigative reporting that will reinforce his progressive credentials.

Mira presents Lemoine's funding offer at the meeting while carefully refraining from endorsing the billionaire or the capitalism he represents. Tony opposes Mira’s proposal to accept dirty money from Lemoine. The other members are swayed by the promise of a cash infusion for their precarious organization. Tony walks away from Birnam Wood but senses an opportunity to showcase his chops as an investigative journalist. Tony reasons that a billionaire who throws money at a leftist group must be up to something. Tony’s instincts are sound. He discovers that Lemoine is involved in a secret project that will get him into big trouble if he’s exposed.

The plot hinges on the project’s secrecy. Lemoine is doing something on a significant scale in a national forest. Doesn’t anyone in New Zealand enter its national forests? It’s difficult to believe that Lemoine’s scheme would have even a remote chance of operating undetected, but I don’t know enough about New Zealand to be sure of that. The story develops some suspenseful moments as Tony hides in the woods, evading drones and capture as he gathers evidence of Lemoine’s operation, but suspense remains low-key for most of the story.

I can’t agree with the novel’s billing as a literary thriller. It is literary in the sense of being well written, with ample attention to character development, although the literary nature of the prose creates a pace that is inconsistent with a thriller. I wouldn’t want to accuse Eleanor Catton of writing run-on sentences, but readers might want to put on comfortable shoes before walking from the beginning to the end of her paragraphs. I have little patience with thriller writers who manufacture “page turners” by putting few words on a page, but Catton goes too far in the opposite direction. She rivals Henry James in her ability to create a scene by describing every single object in sight, including (in Catton’s case) the varieties of spinach and beets and cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks and carrots (and on and on) planted by Birnam Wood.

The novel’s most promising moments come during an argument at a Birnam Wood meeting about the nature of political and economic change and the ineffectual, scolding approach taken by some members of the left. The novel spotlights the in-fighting that make many organizations, and particularly groups comprised of progressive volunteers, completely dysfunctional. "Im pure in my ideals and everyone else is a sellout" isn't the kind of attitude that assures the planting of subversive cabbage patches.

Yet the novel bogs down with conflicts between Mira and Shelley, both of whom seem to develop a thing for Lemoine for reasons that are less than obvious. Chalk it up to billionaire charm, I suppose. The novel is contaminated by sentences like “She wished she could tell her friend the honest truth, which was not that she loved her because she needed her, but that she needed her because she loved her, and in her monumental stupidity and self-absorption, she had only just figured that out.” Self-absorption infects all the speaking characters, but that makes them more annoying than interesting.

I give Birnam Wood high marks for an original if not entirely convincing plot. The final pages are over the top. Perhaps those pages reflect a literary determination to eschew happy or predictable endings, but it is predictable for that very reason. Despite the novel’s flaws, including its pace and disagreeable characters, my inability to guess what might happen next kept me reading with full attention.

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Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Published by Doubleday on March 7, 2023

Aging women are the primary characters in Margaret Atwood’s latest story collection. Sexism and ageism blend in the background of the stories, as they did in Don Lemon’s astonishing remark that women are past their prime by time they enter their 50s. Atwood is proof that Lemon doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The stories are diverse. A couple are probably meant to appeal to intellectuals. Some are funny, although the humor is uneven. The best stories are poignant. All of them showcase Atwood’s love of language, sometimes overtly, as characters discuss the origins and meanings of meanings of words they like or despise.

My favorite story in this collection is “My Evil Mother.” The narrator meets the father who (she suspects) abandoned her. When she was a child, she believed that her mother turned her father into a garden gnome. The narrator’s mother chats with her daughter about spells and potions. The daughter is never quite sure whether her mother is cooking soup or a witch’s brew. The mother tells her daughter that she has been carrying on a battle for the last four hundred years with the daughter’s gym teacher. Back in the day, the gym teacher collected severed penises, keeping them in a cedar box and feeding them bits of grain, as was the custom. Is the narrator’s mother mentally ill or does she just have a bizarre sense of humor? Probably more of the former, but the exasperated (and often embarrassed) narrator eventually realizes that lessons she learned from her mother will serve her in her relationship with her own daughter.

One story is told by a snail whose soul has transmigrated into a customer service representative. The story might be seen as an amusing if uncomfortable take on people who feel they have been born into the wrong bodies. A story told to quarantined humans by an alien has some funny moments. Fans of Chaucer or the Decameron (as well as readers who know how to google) might appreciate the story’s relationship to the character Griselda in folklore. Both stories ask questions about the purpose of being human.

A story set in the world of academia recounts a salty (and slightly drunken) conversation about the history of feminism as a group of women plan a symposium to lay “the foundations for the brave new generation of emerging non-cis-male creatives.” In another story that is probably meant for readers who appreciate education, Hypatia explains how her mother was murdered (skinned by clamshells, to be ghoulishly precise) by a mob of Christian men in Alexandria — while noting that, if it happened today, mob members would have recorded the murder on their phones. Not being an intellectual, I needed to google Hypatia of Alexandria to give the story some context. To be honest, I did the same for Griselda. Atwood is far above my level of intellect but I made an effort to keep up.

In a less successful story, Atwood uses a medium to help her interview George Orwell. He’s not surprised to learn about “cancel culture,” the insurrection, and evil uses of the internet. In another story that didn’t work for me, two aging Hungarians share scandalous memories, some of which might be real, other just fake news.

Atwood has chronicled the marriage of Tig and Nell during her writing career. Those characters star in the first three stories. The first suggests that fears of death are best ignored, lest we mourn events that have not yet happened. Better to preserve an illusion of safety until our fate is revealed. In the second, Nell does a favor for departed friends by telling their story, because they wanted to become words rather than a handful of dust. In the third story, Nell tries to immortalize a dead but beloved cat by making it the subject of Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur.”

The last four stories are about Nell and her memories of Tig after Tig’s death. Nell learns some things (and surmises others) about Tig’s father by reading poems that he wrote during the war. She isn’t sure what she learns, isn’t sure she’s the right audience for the amateurish poems, but she wants to say to the man, I hear you, or at least I’m trying.

One of the post-Tig stories takes the form of a letter in which Nell explains what it means to be a widow: grieving, coping, “tidying up” after a partner’s death, her sense that Tig is still present. The letter is heartfelt and honest, achingly sad and ultimately unsent because she knows that her friends want to hear conventional nothings from widows. Another story is devoted to memories of the lost husband, memories of both his vital and declining days.

The theme of the final story is that death is inconsiderate. It leaves the surviving partner to perform all the chores/repairs that were the duty of the lost partner. Yet she can’t blame Tig. He didn’t intend to grow old.

Growing old is not typically the subject of fiction until writers reach the age when looking back is easier than looking forward. At least when we are older, we don’t fear our own inevitable deaths so much as we fear the deaths of those we love — including, perhaps, a cat. I appreciated Atwood’s willingness to confront the subject in these stories with fearless honesty.

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White Fox by Owen Matthews

Published by Doubleday on March 7, 2023

Writers regularly turn out novels that offer a fictional explanation for Kennedy’s assassination. White Fox is the latest. It is the third in a series of books that feature Alexander Vasin as the central character. The novels follow an arc but each tells a self-contained story.

Vasin was a homicide investigator who became a KGB agent. Because he burned some bridges to uncover a spy in the last novel, General Orlov, his boss in the KGB’s Special Cases Department, placed Vasin in charge of a penal colony in the far North of Russia. The prison is very cold and the prisoners, particularly a gang of Serbs, are ruthless. Vasin knows that he is being punished. The punishment is unfair, but Vasin does not expect fairness in the Soviet Union.

Orlov sends Vasin a “special prisoner.” The prisoner is to be kept alive at all costs. The two men escorting him are to be eliminated. The prisoner’s file identifies him as Lazar Berezovsky, but that isn’t his real name. Berezovsky’s life is in danger because he knows about KGB involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Berezovsky has stashed a file with documents that identify the KGB officers who participated in the conspiracy. Orlov wants that file to gain power over his enemies, including a major in a different department of the KGB who wants Berezovsky to die so that his knowledge will be buried.

Vasin uses his wits rather than his fists to survive, but the story becomes an action novel after a riot sends Vasin fleeing from the prison, keeping Berezovsky and a couple of loyal prison guards at his side. Vasin wants to deliver Berezovsky to Brezhnev (the anticipated successor to Khrushchev) so the government will learn about the KGB’s world-changing shenanigans.

Vasin hopes to intercept a train carrying reinforcements to the prison, but the tracks are buried in deep snow and they must stay alive through unsheltered Arctic nights. They must also avoid the Serbian prisoners who are tracking them. Vasin does not know that two of the KGB major’s men are on the train with orders to kill Berezovsky.

Berezovksy, on the other hand, hopes to escape to a country where nobody wants to kill him. With KGB training, Berezovsky has skills that make it difficult for Vasin to hold him captive. The story involves multiple chases that unfold in realistic detail, sometimes with the help of Roma kids who are organized into a criminal gang.

White Fox creates waves of danger and suspense without relying on James Bond stunts or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s wrestling moves. Vasin is noteworthy because he’s a smart and principled character, albeit one who needs flexible principles to stay alive. His plans to find Berezovsky and his hidden documents are clever, but sometimes Berezovsky is more clever. The chess match that ensues makes White Fox more interesting than a typical tough guy thriller.

The ending is a surprise. I’m not sure whether it leaves room for another chapter in Vasin’s story, but I hope Owen Matthews writes another one.

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Sell Us the Rope by Stephen May

First published in the UK in 2022; published by Bloomsbury on March 7, 2023

“When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope. But first they will lend us the money we will use to buy the rope.” The joke that contributes to the novel’s title is told in 1907 at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. The Fifth Congress is held in London. Its delegates come from many countries, all (apart from the spies) dreaming of a revolution that will give birth to a workers’ paradise created by a Marxist economy.

Koba Ivanovich is a delegate from the country of Georgia. He is unimpressed by London, where child labor abounds, the homeless are not allowed to sleep at night, and the streets are filled with the stench of human and equine waste.

Koba is working for the Okhrana, the secret police force of the Russian Empire. Koba became an informant after distributing pamphlets calling for a workers’ uprising. Unfortunately for Koba, the pamphlets were printed by the Okhrana as a means of ferreting out potential revolutionaries. Koba avoided prison by cooperating with the Okhrana. Although he adopted the name Koba, his true name is Joseph Stalin.

The first half of the novel establishes the characters and sets up the plot. Delegates to the Congress jockey for power as they debate revolutionary strategies, Menshevik versus Bolshevik. At an evening gathering, Maxim Gorky lectures about the need for a tax on land. An American capitalist who hosts that gathering is sympathetic to the revolutionaries and willing to help finance their efforts, but only by loaning them money with interest — hence the joke about rope. Koba is privy to a plan to secure financing the old fashioned way, by robbing a bank. All of this should be fascinating to history buffs, but it is also essential background to a late-developing plot.

Delegates preach the need to empower workers, but most delegates are men who lack the vision to support the empowerment of women. Two female delegates, Rosa Luxemburg and Elli Vuokko, not only fight for a world in which women and men are equal partners in the economy but are equally free to initiate sexual encounters. Together, they make the point that men have fragile egos who are afraid to ask for what they want. Men are motivated to vengeance by fear of a rejection that might not occur. Rosa and Elli ask why men find it so hard to listen to women, why women are expected to feel gratitude for not being murdered.

Elli is a delegate from Finland, where women have the right to vote. She wonders whether voting matters, as elected representatives rarely deliver transformative change, no matter what the Mensheviks think. Koba is thinking of sex with Elli but is flustered when she makes the first move, as if he finds it emasculating to accede to a woman’s desires. Koba’s relationship with Elli becomes a dramatic focal point as the plot heats up in the second half.

The plot is driven by Koba’s divided loyalty to the Okhrana (a loyalty only of convenience) and to the revolutionaries. To mitigate his risk of being outed as an informant, the Okhrana want him to plant evidence that loyal delegates are working for the Tsar. Evidence is hardly necessary, because the Party will readily accept a pointed finger as proof of guilt. “People — and not just in the Party — love to think the worst.” The story’s tension escalates as Koba tries to play both sides. Is he willing to betray people he has come to care about in order to save himself from the Okhrana? Or does the Party pose an even larger threat to Koba than the Tsar?

Stephen May tells a restrained story, trusting the reader to fill in the sweeping breadth of history to come. His focus on a few days during the Fifth Congress allows him to develop his characters as they exist in the moment. The story combines an intriguing plot with characters who have strong personalities. Elli imagines her future as a factory manager after woman are recognized as equal. She tells Koba that she will take many lovers, will never marry or own a cat. In reality, Elli will become a member of the Turku Female Red Guard during the Finnish Civil War and will be captured, raped, and executed by the White Army in 1918. She played a relatively small role in history, but as she is imaged here, she is a principled and fearless woman who chooses to live her life in full, unshackled by any man or government.

Elli comments that anger is fleeting; she has trouble holding onto it. Koba disagrees; anger fuels him. May imagines young Koba to be a complicated and contradictory man, dangerous but not heartless. Koba tells a story of murdering an entirely family to send a message because the patriarch was insufficiently deferential to socialist leaders. He tells a story of murdering his own father. It is easy to imagine Koba as threatening, given the leader Stalin will become. Yet the story balances Koba’s ruthless nature with his shy approach to Elli and his compassionate response to a helpful child whose abusive father reminds Koba of his own. I admire writers who portray the complexity of human nature instead of focusing on the obvious. My admiration is particularly strong when they do so with graceful prose that makes the novel easy to read.

Koba has a growing premonition of being haunted by the ghosts of those whose deaths he will cause, just as he is haunted by his father. He expects to die from an assassin’s bullet or a rope around his neck, and he does not seem to regard that death as unwelcome. This is the fate he no doubt deserves, but he will die in bed from a stroke at 73. The story ends with a comment upon the unfairness of statues erected to Stalin while Elli enters history with an unmarked grave. Sell Us the Rope invites the reader to remember the forgotten. Strong characterization and the drama of history make it easy to accept that invitation.

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Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez

First published in Spain in 2019; published in translation by Random House/Hogarth on February 7, 2023

Our Share of Night is a literary horror novel, a domestic drama with a supernatural twist. A father hopes that his son did not inherit his connection to the Darkness. When it becomes apparent that his son shares his ability to summon the Darkness, he wants to shield his son from his wife’s family, who expect the Darkness to reveal the secret of immortality. The son loves and hates his father. He will eventually need to confront his family, just as his father did.

The Order regards Juan Peterson as a medium, an essential bridge to the Darkness and its secrets. The Order has deep roots in England, but a branch of the family moved to Argentina, where it is ruled by the matriarch Mercedes. Juan and Rosario, the daughter of Mercedes, had a son named Gaspar. Rosario died three months before the novel begins, but Juan should still be able to speak with her. He cannot find her because she has been hidden from him. Who did the hiding?

Juan was born with a defective heart. He’s had multiple surgeries, but he knows his condition will lead to a premature death. Before he dies, Juan is desperate to find a way to keep the Order from taking control of Gaspar. The Order wants to compel Juan to allow his essence to enter Gaspar at the moment of death. The transmigration of consciousness is the secret of immortality that the Order craves. Juan wants his son to live his own life, not as a continuation of Juan and not a life of servitude to the Order.

Juan is convinced that Rosario was murdered because she wanted to protect Gaspar from the clutches of her family. When the story opens, Gaspar is only six. The Order does not know whether Gaspar has inherited the ability to become a medium. Juan learns the distressing truth when Gaspar begins to see dead people. Juan keeps that knowledge a secret from family members as he teaches Gaspar to make the dead go away.

The story spans generations as it traces the history of the Order. Mercedes is the “priestess of a god who ignores her.” She is always looking for new mediums but Juan is the best she has found. Mariana Enríquez details the rituals the Order follows to satisfy the hunger of the Darkness. Initiates willingly, even ecstatically, lose limbs when they touch the Darkness after it is summoned by a medium. It’s rare for horror novels to make the supernatural seem real rather than silly, but Enríquez has created a shadow world that seems just as real and even more frightening than the world we inhabit.

The novel’s first half focuses on Juan and his relationships with other family members who belong to the Order, including Rosario’s half-sister, with whom Juan has a complicated and intimate history. Much about Juan is complicated, from his bisexual relationships with family members to his parenting of Gaspar. Is Juan an abusive father or is he doing what must be done to protect his son?

Gaspar comes into his own when he enters an abandoned house with his friends. One of those friends is Adela, a distant relative who lost her arm to the Darkness. The door to the house is locked but Gaspar has the ability to enter locked doors. They discover that the house is larger on the inside than its outside dimensions. Adela enters a room in the house and closes the door behind her, challenging Gaspar with the only door he cannot open. Adela is never seen again (at least not in the corporeal world). Her disappearance will trouble Gaspar in the years to come. Gaspar will also be troubled by memories, or the absence of memories that would explain gaps in his life. Those memories will eventually return and illuminate Gaspar’s history with his father, but only after his father’s death.

Like many good horror novels, the story contrasts supernatural terror with the horror that is part of life in the seen world. Chapters in the second half follow several characters, often embodying a different aspect of life in Argentina at different times in the nation’s turbulent history. Pablo is one of Gaspar’s friends who entered the house with Adela. Pablo is secretly in love with Gaspar, but Gaspar is straight. As he grows older, Pablo struggles to balance his fear of AIDS — a disease that eventually claims most of his friends — with the thrill of anonymous sex. Pablo is shunned by moralistic Argentina. He still feels the hand that grasped his shoulder when he was lost in the house where Adela disappeared. Perhaps the supernatural forces that haunt him are symbolic of the other fears that torment gay men in Argentina.

Vicky was also in the house with Gaspar and Pablo. Ten years later, she’s a talented medical student, with an almost supernatural ability to diagnose hidden diseases. She wants Gaspar to believe that his occasional encounters with (the ghost of?) Adela are hallucinations brought on by epilepsy. The reader, like Gaspar, will doubt that medicine can explain the experiences that Gaspar, Pablo, and Vicky have. The novel asks whether disease and mental illness might be an outsider's explanation of perceptions they do not share or understand.

A late chapter follows a journalist who tries to investigate the story of Adela. She learns how difficult it is to find Gaspar, even when she knows exactly where he lives. Another chapter follows Gaspar as he is haunted by the ghosts of his father and Adela. Psychiatric care does no good in a country where disappearances are common and everyone feels haunted. Argentina’s military dictatorship is a version of the Darkness; its believers control the nation in the way that the Order controls Gaspar’s family.

The novel covers an impressive amount of ground without ever causing confusion. Enríquez’s crystalline prose build a supernatural world that no less sharply focused than the Argentina in which her carefully crafted characters live. Themes of family drama (a well-meaning father whose parenting is cruel because he knows no other way; a mother who shields her child from the child's controlling grandmother) will resonate with families that are troubled by violence and strife that has no supernatural origin. A strong ending resolves Gaspar’s immediate problem while recognizing that the pain of lost souls and the risk of new horrors are always a part of life. Our Share of Night sets a new bar for literary horror novels.

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