Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss Birnam Wood By Eleanor Catton
In-Person Meeting
Sunday, April 27, 2025
4:30-6:00 pm PST
In-person San Francisco location
Carpooling from SF avail. Contact Kirsten.
Zoom on request
Location sent to registrants the week of the meeting
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
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Registration ends Friday, April 25
Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton
432 pages
2023
Catton was deemed a prodigy and author to watch when her first novel, The Luminaries, won the Booker prize. In this, her third novel, vision emerges as the topic once again. Technically speaking, it’s another virtuoso performance: elaborately plotted, richly conceived, enormously readable. It might seem like cavilling to suggest that what it lacks is an original or surprising sense of our riven world. But without this kind of vision – without insight that reaches beyond good and evil – you risk creating only a superbly polished mirror, one that shows us the world as we already know it.
It’s hippies versus billionaires: a scenario full of comic potential, of course. To spike the mixture, Catton throws in a righteous young aspiring journalist, Tony Gallo, and a recently knighted New Zealand business maven, Sir Owen Darvish, and his loving wife, Lady Darvish (as with Sir Owen’s fictional predecessor, Sir William Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, “The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly”).
The first half of the novel, setting all this up, is hugely entertaining. Catton, you think, can do anything fiction requires: she can write funny social satire; she can stage a convincingly self-defeating fight among leftist radicals; she can notice “the hash of oily streaks and fingerprints” on a locked phone screen. You keep waiting for her to do something astonishing with her setup – to give us a novel that doesn’t just crash dishevelled goodies (Birnam Wood) into a suave baddie (Robert Lemoine).
(Kevin Power, The Guardian)
Meeting organizer:
Kirsten Miclau
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org
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