60 pages • 2 hours read
Eleanor CattonBirnam Wood
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Contemporary Technology
Eleanor Catton presents contemporary technology such as smart phones, drones, and GPS as insidious and uses it to enhance the sense of danger and develop Lemoine as a character. Lemoine is analogous to malware and the insidious technology that surrounds the characters; like a computer virus that lures people with false messages, Lemoine tempts characters with the face for which they’ll fall. Like malware, once a character comes in contact with Lemoine they become infected with destructive ambition, the first symptom of which is betrayal and the last is death. Contemporary technology is a motif that contributes to the novel’s theme, The Dangerous Proliferation of Technology in Modern Life; Catton indexes this theme to Lemoine as a character.
Like a computer program, Lemoine’s decisions are logical. When he runs up against emotions, he resets, such as when Mira and Shelley disobey his order to drive straight to the farm. It takes a moment to reprogram before he contacts them with a new story. Compared to Mira’s passion, Shelley’s resentment, the love of Lady Darvish, and the righteous indignation of Tony, Lemoine has little emotion. He’s practically robotic, and hard to separate from the contemporary technology that he wields. His backstory encourages this reading since, like computer viruses, the true source of Lemoine is unreachable.
Contemporary technology is everywhere in this novel, always traceable back to Lemoine: He’s in the sky in drone form and in an airplane, and he’s in characters’ pockets in the form of phones. The devices and phones are the tools that he defiantly holds aloft as he dies, reminding the reader that even if he’s gone, the potential for danger remains with the contemporary technology that he leaves behind.
Old-School Technology
Older technology symbolizes the fight against danger in the novel. The bicycle that Mira utilizes on her first trip to Thorndike shields her. Even in a town that’s almost deserted, the petrol station teller “didn’t look up as Mira cycled past” despite all the money being out on the counter (60). Catton juxtaposes this mode of transportation to Lemoine’s airplane, making the bicycle inconspicuous while the airplane brings danger to the area.
Similarly, the old-style analog camera with actual film is helpful for both Tony and Mira. Mira notes that “it was an accessory that seemed to put strangers instinctively at ease” (590). The physical action of Tony winding the film makes Lemoine’s blood cold. For the camera and the bicycle, the physical action and the permanence of the objects are anathema to Lemoine, who deals with impermanent images and alterable truth.
The instrument of Lemoine’s death is also old-school technology. While Lemoine’s soldiers carry assault rifles, Lady Darvish uses an old .22 that her husband used as a child, a style of weapon first manufactured in 1857. She also uses the knife, one of the most ancient tools of mankind.
The permanence of these objects and the physical skill needed to operate them is the antithesis of Lemoine’s digital world in which drones can be operated from miles away and photos are taken in bursts of hundreds and deleted or altered just as quickly. These old-school pieces of technology are symbols of a more permanent, lasting world that requires skill and can be held up as counter-balances to modern technologies that are put to dangerous uses in the novel.
Nature
Birnam Wood is named after the forest in Macbeth, a forest used to trick and overthrow a wicked king. The motif of nature appears in many forms in this novel pointing toward the same idea: that humans are destructive. Just as the wood in Macbeth appears to advance on the castle, nature is doing its best to fight back.
In Birnam Wood, the wilderness isn’t described or given figurative attention despite the fact that it holds the resources for which the characters ultimately die. For an eco-thriller, there’s very little imagery of the earth itself. This lack emphasizes the characters’ attitudes, as illustrated by Sir Owen’s false concern about conservation. They don’t truly care enough to notice it. Even Mira, the horticulturalist, spends little time appreciating the plants because she’s more concerned with how they’ll serve her cause. This amounts to another larger point about human destruction in the novel: They all use the earth as a means of getting what they want, whether it’s through guerrilla gardening, knighthoods, or mining, and none of them are honestly concerned with protecting it.
Nature, like the forest in Macbeth, fights back. When Tony goes into the woods he gets trapped in a storm, broken by rocks in a river, and finally dies alone. It’s as if nature punishes him, knowing that he will end setting it on fire. Mira says that “most plants are actually pretty hard to kill. […] They want to live” (350). Catton hence grants nature a sense of agency in the novel, making it fight for its life alongside the characters who destroy it.
Catton finishes the novel with Tony wondering if anyone will put out the forest fire. It is a larger, existential question about the threat to the environment in general, and her motif of nature under attack points a finger at the reader for an answer.
