Birnam Wood
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 first third runs on backstory and interior monologue before much happens, no chapter breaks to mark progress, and one reader complains it simply “rambles and has no chapters at all”. The ensemble fares worse for some: the billionaire, the idealist, and the money-grubbing landowner read as types rather than people, dismissed by one reviewer as “Catton’s husks, known to some as characters”. The page-long political debates strike detractors as the author staging an argument, “ranty and smug” in one reader’s summary. And the late swerve into violence, which fans read as earned tragedy, lands for others as “the literary equivalent of The Fonz on waterskis”.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
