'I didn't want to flatter a certain point of view or let anyone off the hook', says Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton. Photo / Robert Catto.
What happens when you publicly accuse your nation of being dominated by “neoliberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture”? If you are a Booker Prize winner from New Zealand, you risk being abused by your own prime minister on daytime television.
In 2015, following Eleanor Catton’s comments about her native country at the Jaipur literary festival, its then leader John Key told a TV audience that, as a novelist, she had as much insight into politics as a butcher or the captain of the All Blacks, managing to insult three different professions at once. Catton was furious. “But I also worried he might be right. So I read a ton of books about politics and economics. And I realised I hadn’t been anywhere near critical enough.”
It’s been a decade since Catton became, at 28, the youngest ever winner of the Booker Prize with The Luminaries, a compulsively readable, kaleidoscopic melodrama about a group of 19th-century gold diggers that blended a formal astrological playfulness with meta-aware storytelling. These days, she lives in Cambridge, where her husband, the American poet Steven Toussaint, is working on a PhD; the plastic toys in the garden are evidence of their two-year-old daughter.
Revenge is indeed a dish best served cold: her new novel, Birnam Wood, is a pacy eco thriller set in New Zealand circa 2016 (ie, pre- Jacinda Ardern) that lobs several missiles at the country’s history of land mining and foreign property investment. It pivots on the dodgy business interests of Robert Lemoine, a Bond-style billionaire villain modelled on Peter Thiel, the German-American PayPal co-founder and early Trump supporter to whom Catton’s country controversially gave citizenship in 2011.
You don’t need to be acquainted with any of this, though, to find it richly satisfying. Rather, through its vibrant cast of guerilla-gardening millennial activists, who strike a land deal with Lemoine, it works equally well as a satire of both the petty concerns of modern identity politics and the complicity of even the most well intentioned in some of the big moral questions of the day. It’s also terrifically good fun.
“There isn’t much conversation in New Zealand about its complicity in global affairs and I did want to write about that,” says Catton. “But I was also thinking about the way in which we have all played a part in the ideological polarisations that started happening around Brexit and the election of Trump. I knew instinctively I didn’t want to flatter a certain point of view or let anyone off the hook. I wanted to ironise every character equally.”
Catton is easy-going company, but she is also one of the most serious-minded, deep-thinking novelists I’ve ever met. She’s fascinated by the machinations of her craft, landing magpie-like throughout our conversation on the influence of the Christ story on western storytelling (“it’s essentially a three-act drama with two twists, like all good screenplays”), her love for dramatic irony, and her abiding passion for Jane Austen and Shakespeare. Macbeth was a big influence on Birnam Wood – she regards it as a play not about supernatural prophecy but about the “seductive appeal of certainty”, a key theme in her novel.
Then she’s onto technology, which also features heavily: Lemoine made his money from drones; characters are always on their phones, often in order to covertly track the movements of each other. Catton, it turns out, has a pretty hard-line take on phone tech and social media, mainly because of the way they dissolve the temporal relationship between action and consequence.
“Online interaction essentially strips human behaviour of its moral dimension,” she says. “It’s a terribly distorting, dangerous environment. Yet at the same time, Lemoine is essentially illegally mining the rare minerals that are required to produce phones. And everywhere today, those who claim to be environmentalists often have lives that are constructed online using these very same devices that have appalling destructive legacies. There is a very strong sense of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, which to me seems particularly glaring on the Left.” She laughs. “I’m quite critical of the Left, aren’t I? But I do think that there is a lot of bitter infighting on the Left and a general distrust of moderation, which often serves the interests of the Right quite wonderfully.”
Catton spent her first six years in Canada, before her parents returned to New Zealand, and was a bookish child, partly because her mother was a librarian, partly because there was no television in the house. She wrote her first novel, The Rehearsal, at 22 – a structurally mischievous account of a relationship between a high-school teacher and a student, which among other things seemed to anticipate many of the MeToo conversations about abuse and power.
The Luminaries followed five years later, and was received with a degree of sniffiness in New Zealand. In the past she has put this down to a male-dominated reviewing culture. Now, she says she thinks it was also because she had written about astrology. “There was a real irritation among reviewers in having to take that seriously. In my experience, most of the people who are interested in astrology are women.”
The year after she won the Booker, the prize was controversially opened up to American authors. Is she in favour? “I was at first. The year I won, everyone on the shortlist had either studied in the US or had dual US citizenship. But I now think that people who grow up in the Commonwealth or in countries that were once part of the British empire have a shared history that has its own value, even if that history is problematic at times and needs reckoning with.”
It took her 10 years to follow The Luminaries, partly because she feared that in winning the Booker, she had become untouchable for her editors. “I worried they wouldn’t tell me if what I was writing wasn’t any good,” she says. Instead, she’s spent a fair amount of the previous decade writing screenplays, including the 2020 adaptation of Emma, and the 2020 TV miniseries adaptation of The Luminaries.
She’s a big believer in the duty of storytelling to entertain. “There is a great snobbery about escapism and genre fiction in literature,” she says. “Yet it’s a deeply human thing to feel enjoyment. Although the actual ending is quite bleak, I wanted Birnam Wood to orient the reader towards the future in a positive way, in that they wanted to stick around to see what happened. To deny readers the pleasure of that is to take them down a very nihilistic road.”
She’s equally sniffy about the rise of “auto-fiction” novels that dramatise personal experience rather than looking at the broader world beyond. “When I sat down to write Birnam Wood, it seemed to me that even novelists who were writing about the present were stopping at a point of apathetic self-awareness, rather than engaging with the issues,” she says. “I felt quite critical of that in my own reading. I do feel that there is a cowardice in confining your literary project to something so close to autobiography that no one could possibly criticise it.”
As a corrective, Catton modelled Birnam Wood on the great 19th-century social novels, fizzing with debate and dialogue while refusing to affirm a single point of view. “I do think the novel is the great moral art form, in that it allows you to live inside people other than yourself,” she says. “And I feel impatient with novels that sidestep that moral possibility, sometimes out of laziness. The difficulty is that real honest mature morality is deeply compromised and deeply ambivalent. It’s never a settled question, it’s shifting all the time.”
She stops for a second, then laughs. “I sometimes fear that this makes the novel too subtle an art form for the present day.”