Eleanor Catton on Birnam Wood and returning to the page from the screen

Since then, Catton has turned her attention to the screen, adapting The Luminaries as a television series for BBC and New Zealand’s TVNZ, also writing the screenplay for 2020’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. 

But this year, she returns to the printed word, following up The Luminaries, and her 2008 Betty Trask Award-winning debut The Rehearsal with Birnam Wood. Published in the UK at the beginning of March, Birnam Wood is both a gripping psychological thriller and a satirical examination of our contemporary political moment. And on 16 March, the author joins us, and writer Val McDermid in our Queen Elizabeth Hall to tell us all about it, and her writing life. 

Call us impatient, but we couldn’t quite wait until then to find out a little more about Catton’s much anticipated latest work, and so ahead of her appearance at the Southbank Centre we caught up with the author to ask her a few questions, starting with the big pachyderm seated just behind us.

OK, so let’s get the obvious question out the way first; why have we had to wait so long for a third Eleanor Catton novel?

The idea for Birnam Wood first came to me in 2016, but shortly after I started working on it, a couple of my screenwriting projects got green-lit in quick succession. I didn’t come back to the draft properly until early 2020, by which time I was pregnant, and of course having a baby totally changes one’s relationship with time.

You’ve previously described yourself as a very self-critical individual, so did winning the Booker Prize give you a huge boost, a reassurance? Or is it something that places a weight of expectation on your subsequent work?

I’m very grateful that I was able to take my time with Birnam Wood. There wasn’t a financial pressure to produce another book immediately; I was able to spend a few years reading, following my nose, thinking about the book, making sketches and jotting down ideas. And I am sure that I embraced the book’s genre aspirations much more gleefully than I might have if The Luminaries hadn’t had that extraordinary early recognition. As for the weight of expectation, though — I depend on that feeling! I hope I feel it with every book I write.

‘I depend on feeling the weight of expectation! I hope I feel it with every book I write.’

As well as screenwriting the television adaptation of The Luminaries, you also wrote the screenplay for the 2020 film, Emma; how different a challenge is it writing for the screen rather than the page?

There are countless differences, beginning with the fact that screenplays are commissioned and novels are (usually) not. Everything in a novel is there because the author wanted it that way; as a screenwriter, on the other hand, you have to work within a budget and a schedule, not to mention in collaboration with a huge number of other creative people, all of whom have ideas and pressures of their own, and any number of real-world problems and contingencies can force changes to the script. I like the practical aspect of the job, as well as the collaborative aspect, but it was fun to return to fiction writing after several years working in film and to remember all the things that fiction does best. I’ve ended up with a greater appreciation of both forms.

And, following on from that, has your experience of screenwriting inflicted any changes on the way you’ve approached your new novel, Birnam Wood?

Yes, though I wouldn’t use the word ‘inflicted’. By far the biggest influence on Birnam Wood was Jane Austen’s Emma, which I adapted for film in 2020. Every time I reread that book, I find something new to marvel at. Its design is perfect, and yet it is so much fun to read, and the characters are so alive and so vivid and so endlessly loveable, that you forget it’s been designed at all. There are ironies everywhere you look: every character, and every situation, has an echo or a transposition somewhere else. And it has a three-act structure, which is pretty awesome given that it was written a hundred years before the invention of cinema.

Inevitably, I brought a lot of what I’d learned as a screenwriter to Birnam Wood: act structure, dialogue, a focus on character that reveals itself in action, turning points, crisis points, a new respect for symmetry. But I was finding all of that in Austen, so in a sense the screenwriting influence was indirect. I see Jane Austen as the formal heir to Shakespeare’s comedies; with Birnam Wood I wanted to do something similar, but using a tragic form.

‘The biggest influence on Birnam Wood was Jane Austen’s Emma. Every time I reread that book, I find something new to marvel at. Its design is perfect, and yet it is so much fun to read.’

Where did the inspiration for Birnam Wood come from?

My first ideas for the book came in the aftermath of the political upheavals of 2016. There was such pervasive shame and bewilderment around that time, and so much blaming of others and self-exculpating, right across the political spectrum. I went back and re-read Macbeth, thinking it might have something to say about the contemporary political moment. For the first time, I saw it as a play about certainty; about the seduction of certainty, and how dangerous and blinding it can be to view the future with certainty.

I knew I didn’t want to write an adaptation of Macbeth — I wanted to retain the capacity to surprise the reader, and to invent at will — but I wanted to explore this in some way. My idea was to design the novel in such a way that every character would be a plausible contender for the role of Macbeth: in other words, each character is potentially the villain, though of course none would see themselves that way. Each is also the Lady Macbeth to somebody else, and each is the witches, and each is a kind of Birnam Wood, as well. So the book has a sort of kaleidoscopic form. That was how I began thinking about it.

I’ve always believed that form is, or ought to be, a kind of question. In Birnam Wood I wanted to ask questions about complicity, intergenerational conflict, political responsibility, political alternatives, and the fact that while everyone can agree that we’re all hopelessly polarised, no one ever seems to think that they’re the one who needs to change.

‘My idea [with Birnam Wood] was to design the novel in such a way that every character would be a plausible contender for the role of Macbeth’.

What do you hope readers will take from the book?

Pleasure, first and foremost. If it inspires conversation or even change, so much the better; but more than anything, I hope the book is fun to read.

You’ll be in conversation with Val McDermid when you join us in our Queen Elizabeth Hall; have you met before? And what are you looking forward to discussing?

We’ve never met, and I can’t wait. I drew on her book Forensics when writing certain scenes in Birnam Wood, and I am a huge admirer of her fiction too—I never pass through airport security without thinking of her novel The Vanishing Point. I’m looking forward to discussing everything under the sun.