Selling Out in the High Country

Abstract

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood, Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023, 423 pp

Among the many pleasures of reading Eleanor Catton’s idiosyncratic fiction is her sheer inventiveness, the sense that she likes to set herself difficult or even improbable writing challenges. Her works hover on the boundaries of established genres—coming of age in her first novel The Rehearsal (2008), crime fiction in The Luminaries (2013)—while refusing to abide by genre conventions. The Rehearsal could be seen as an anti-creative work: set in a performing arts school, the novel presents a caustic take on training in creative arts as ego-eviscerating initiation. The Luminaries arbitrarily (for many readers) fuses the extrinsic numerical patterns of Western astrology with a character-based historical murder mystery cum neo-Victorian sensation novel. Catton’s most recent novel, Birnam Wood, offers another kind of formal conundrum.