Cover image of "Birnam Wood," a novel about a billionaire survivalist in New Zealand

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Elon Musk gets all the attention these days. But back around the turn of the century, when they merged their companies to form PayPal, Musk’s partner Peter Thiel was at least equally prominent. The German-American venture capitalist and entrepreneur, a billionaire four times over, has emerged in recent years as a Right-Wing libertarian and a survivalist. Now a citizen of New Zealand, he has led like-minded Silicon Valley moguls like himself to buy up land there to prepare for the Apocalypse, which they view as inevitable if not imminent. Thiel is despised by many of his peers. And that seems to be the case, too, with Robert Lemoine, the high tech billionaire at the heart of Eleanor Catton’s captivating New Zealand thriller, Birnam Wood.

An invitation to tragedy

In a secluded area on New Zealand’s South Island, a landslide has cut off the town of Thorndike and nearby farms that border Korowai National Park. A large farm there, the site of a planned subdivision, had just been taken off the market—and that arouses the interest of Mira Bunting, twenty-nine years old, who is the founder of an activist collective known among its members as Birnam Wood. Mira and her colleagues have for years been illegally planting and harvesting vegetable crops on isolated tracts of fallow land. And Sir Owen Darvish’s isolated farm by the national park now seems an ideal target for a large new project. But instead it will prove to be an invitation to tragedy.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (2023) 432 pages ★★★★★

Photo of a forested national park in New Zealand, like the site in this novel about a billionaire survivalist
Scene in a forested national park in New Zealand, which may be like the site of illegal activity in the novel. Image: Kahurangi National Park, Nelson, New Zealand – New Zealand official photo

Environmental activists meet a high-tech billionaire survivalist

Unknown to Mira, Owen Darvish has agreed to sell the farm to an American high-tech billionaire named Robert Lemoine. The American is the founder and CEO of Autonomo, a manufacturer of specialized drones with both civilian and military uses. And those facts trigger Mira’s contrary instincts. “Like all self-mythologizing rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo.” She can’t quite bring herself to hate Owen Darvish. But Lemoine, a survivalist “prepper,” seems an enemy from any perspective. And on first meeting that’s precisely what she thinks. Soon, however, he proves both charming and welcoming. Birnam Wood will go happily to work on the fields of the Darvish farm. And that will lead them down the road to heartbreak and calamity.

About the author

Photo of Eleanor Catton, author of this novel about a billionaire survivalist
Eleanor Catton. Image: Goodreads

Birnam Wood is Eleanor Catton‘s third novel. Her first two ventures into long-form fiction won her numerous awards. (Her second novel won the Booker Prize.) She was born in Canada in 1985 of an American father and a New Zealander mother. The family moved to New Zealand when Catton was six. There, she received a BS in English from the University of Canterbury and a Master’s in creative writing from the Victoria University of Wellington. She is related to the historian Bruce Catton. In 2011 she met a Chicago-born poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and they moved together to New Zealand, marrying in 2016. Currently, the couple live in Cambridge, England with their daughter.

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