Excerpt from Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Birnam Wood

Mira's first thought, on coming home to the empty flat, had been that Shelley had finally done it: packed up all her things and left, without warning, and without a note. After calling Shelley's name and hearing no reply, she had stood in the open doorway for several seconds, reconciling herself to the new though long-expected reality of Shelley being gone – before her vision clarified and she saw that Shelley's bike was still in the laundry, and her shoes were still piled beneath the radiator, and her beloved bomber jacket was still hanging on its coat hook in the hall. Feeling foolish, Mira hastily revised her thought to wonder, instead, if some sudden emergency had taken Shelley from the house ... But if that were the case, then wouldn't she have called – or texted, at the very least?

She remembered suddenly the location tracker app that they had both installed some months ago, and never used. She got out her phone to check if the connection was still active, but in the brief time it took for the device to fetch Shelley's data from whatever configuration of satellites and local masts were coordinating her position, she grew ashamed of the intrusion, and exited the map before it fully loaded, reproaching herself that it was no wonder Shelley had been feeling smothered, and wondering, not for the first time, when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone.

Two weeks had passed since she had first divined that Shelley wanted out of Birnam Wood, and for two weeks she had been paralysed by the same mute and stricken helplessness that she had felt when her parents first announced their separation – chiding herself, as she had then, that at her age and state of independence it was absurd that she should feel so childishly forsaken, and so sad. Mira was a remorseless critic of her own emotions. She frequently disparaged what she felt and thought, and she was quick to punish anything she judged to be a sign of moral weakness, no matter how privately or invisibly it was expressed. She hated how the divorce had come to quantify her relationships with both her parents, such that one weekend dinner with her mother now placed her one weekend dinner with her father in debt, and every conversation, every holiday, every shared interest, even every congenital resemblance now felt inscribed in a vast ledger of credit and debit that somehow it was her responsibility to balance. She felt cheapened by the effort, monetised, contractualised, demeaned – and so she did not allow the feeling; instead, she simply squashed it, telling herself, in a tone of matronly admonishment, that divorce was not uncommon, that other people were vastly more unfortunate, and that unless her health or her life had been threatened, then she had no business to complain. So it was with Shelley now. Mira was devastated by the thought of her departure, but her instinct for self-censure was so strong that she denied her devastation almost before she had even identified that that was what it was; this left her with the sense of being both entirely bereft and entirely blameworthy, having condemned herself for what she would not permit herself to feel.

The maxim of Mira's childhood had been that she was older than her years. Her parents had been fond of entertaining, and when she was young it had been a point of pride for them that she could hold her own among their adult friends, sitting up late at the dinner table in the bohemian detritus of empty bottles and dripping candles burning low, following the conversation, and even interjecting now and then with her own precocious point of view. When she was a child her father had worked as an urban planner for the city council, and her mother as an academic in the field of international relations; their circle of acquaintance was wide, and – as Mira would only really comprehend much later – almost universally left-wing, a fact that naturally came to shape Mira's own political expressions, for her contributions at the table were never more appreciated than when they reflected what was commonly agreed. She had grown up with a stout faith in the proven clarity of right and wrong, and had never doubted for a moment that to be treated as an adult was better than to be treated as a child; but she had feared, in lonely moments, that for her parents she existed merely as a kind of party trick, a dazzling proof of how well she had been parented, a living testament not to her own powers of conviction and discernment, but to theirs. Even as an adult she could not dispel, at times, a nagging sense of fraudulence, that she was most valued for what she most easily performed.

Excerpted from Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. . Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Eleanor Catton. All rights reserved.