Birnam Wood

by Eleanor Catton

Like all self-mythologising 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.

Mira could not understand this. She was not given to casual self-deprecation, and was convinced that Shelley had been either bullied or brainwashed out of a more natural self-belief; the irony, of course – which Shelley had only fully grasped in retrospect – was that a gently deprecating sense of humour was actually one of the things that Shelley most liked about herself, and one of the things, it had to be said, that she most loved about her mother.

Cast virtually since birth in the role of the family peacemaker, and praised throughout her adolescence for having cost her parents not a single night of sleep, Shelley had lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikeable – a fate even more terrible than being disliked, for it encompassed not only her relationships with others, but her private judgments of herself.

He was a bright boy, prideful of his intellect, critical often to the point of indignation, and observant of hypocrisy, especially, he insisted, in himself; and while he could accept that there was more than a touch of petulance in his decision to stop attending Mass – he made an exception for funerals and weddings, but refused to take Communion, genuflect, or sing – he was careful to subject his atheism to the same doubts and provocations with which he had once challenged his belief.

He in no way opposed the fundamental aims of feminism, and indeed would have welcomed, he felt sure, any well-argued point in its favour; but over the course of his twenties, he had found himself increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge.

she had read online somewhere that one’s parents’ voting preference was by far the most accurate predictor of one’s own political alignment, way more than age, ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, or locale.

The camera didn’t work – she had found it at the tip, still in its carry case, defunct – but she had taken to heart a reminiscence of her father’s, who in his youth had hitch-hiked all around the country, that no matter how dirty or unshaven he had been, or how far into the wilderness, or how late the hour, whenever he wore his long-lens camera round his neck, he always got a ride; it was an accessory that seemed to put strangers instinctively at ease.

he had forgotten how arousing it could be to gauge his own effect on a genuine blank canvas, someone who had no idea what he was worth. Even more arousing was the fact that she had lied to him – and not in the squirmy, tiresomely self-exculpating way that he was used to whenever one of his factotums let him down, but flagrantly, defiantly, and with the kind of individual flourishes that bespoke a genuine enjoyment of the practice of deception.

As he conjured her deliciously inside himself, he realised, all at once, that she would be his acquisition. She would be his venture. She would be the final piece of camouflage. Not these dime-a-dozen, grasping, self-important outrage-mongers, these obsequious nonentities, these small-time pseudo-pundits who traded in stupidity and called themselves subversive for shitting where they ate.

as she cycled home Shelley reflected that in all her years at Birnam Wood she had never quite mastered the skill of knowing in every individual circumstance whether to overplay or underplay her expertise. It was something that Mira seemed to know instinctively – that a demonstrated competency reassured some people and aggravated others;

holding up her bowl, but Amber didn’t smile. Shelley noted with annoyance that Amber was the only one in the room who wasn’t eating. ‘Addicted to martyrdom,’ Mira would have said, rolling her eyes. ‘You know nothing would make her happier than if it was all gone by the time she went to serve herself. She’d be over the moon.’

‘There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough – and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.’

It drives me nuts the way we talk about polyamory as if it’s the new frontier, as if it’s an act of protest, like you’ve transcended ownership and bravely liberated yourself from patriarchal structures or whatever, when it’s literally the complete opposite, it’s that you don’t want to take moral responsibility for the fact that you want to fuck other people, or the fact that you can’t commit, or the fact that you’re unhappy and unfulfilled, so you just redefine morality so that you don’t have to face your own selfishness and actually call it out for what it is.

Jill was good like that: she could always find a way, with perfect plausible deniability, of nursing someone’s ego back to health, and as Sir Owen chose another truffle from the chocolate box, he reflected that if there was one thing these dinner parties really did have going for them, it was to remind him that he didn’t envy other people’s marriages one bit.

As he ate cross-legged on his unmade bed, he recalled a conversation that he’d had with Mira in the early days of Birnam Wood. They’d been debating the ethics of wealth redistribution, and Mira had told him about an old custom in her father’s family, where, if ever there was a piece of cake or a biscuit to be shared between two children, the rule was that one child would get to cut it, and the other child would get to choose.

And as for being moderate – sure, he meant it as an insult, but didn’t the entire project of left-wing politics depend on people being willing, at some level, to share, and wasn’t sharing basically just moderation by another name – and anyway, between the two of them, wasn’t he the one who was more guilty of propping up the status quo by shooting her ideas down and dropping names of dead philosophers as if that was in any way a legitimate response to anything any more – and why was it that people on the left were always talking about who was actually on the left – wasn’t that kind of out of date? And if it wasn’t, then maybe it should be, because it was pretty bloody off-putting to be treated like a double-dealer all the time.

the last thing that crossed his mind before he drifted off to sleep was a quotation that he’d heard someplace, whose attribution he’d forgotten – that only something that a person didn’t want to see in print was news, and everything else was advertising.

Mira headed back downhill and Lemoine returned to the plane and climbed back into the cockpit, and Tony made a gun out of his index finger and his thumb, aimed it at the billionaire, and pulled the trigger. ‘Pow,’ he whispered.

‘Because I saw this blog a while back,’ Mira went on, ‘where this woman had just decided to stop saying sorry, like, ever, and every time she would have said it, she found a way of saying thank you instead. So, like, instead of saying “sorry for being late”, she’d say, “thanks for waiting”, and instead of saying “sorry for being such a mess” she’d say, “thanks for being so understanding”, and on and on like that.

years of coordinating Birnam volunteers had left her with the stout belief that there was nothing more beneficial to group harmony than to ensure the food was plentiful and good, and with that principle in mind, she had put in a thousand-dollar order at the liquor store as well.

that mean that he couldn’t be a psychopath? Her father had given her a copy of The Psychopath Test one Christmas (having read it already; they’d had great fun diagnosing all their relatives in turn), and she had a hazy memory that one of the items on the checklist was an inability to laugh

She was proud, as she knew he was too, that they were the kind of couple whom people spoke of only as a set.

the real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between what’s right and what’s easy. They’re between what’s wrong and what’s hard.’

But she was not unaware that there was a certain satisfaction to be found in hopelessness, a certain piety, a touch of martyrdom, in feeling oneself and one’s entire generation to have been wronged by those in power, and deceived, and discouraged from civic participation, and robbed, and made fun of, and maligned;

his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life – ‘real life’, Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.