Birnam Wood

Mira Bunting is the 29-year-old founder of Birnam Wood. She’s a natural leader: charismatic, intelligent, and passionate. Eleanor Catton describes her as self-mythologizing and in need of a villain. Mira is an anti-hero because the shadow side of her outsized personality is that she’s a liar, hubristic, and willing to excuse her own bad behavior if it benefits her cause. She steals equipment, borrows money without intending to pay, and commits frequent, small dishonesties like pretending not to see the honesty box for her campsite. When she’s presented with Lemoine’s money, she has no problems lying to her group to ensure their support. Mira’s characterization is the foundation for the theme of Compromising Morality in Service to a Cause.

What makes Mira different to a character like Shelley, however, is Mira’s guilt if she’s in danger of being caught, if she’s being untrue to herself, or hurting certain people. Then she becomes “stricken, desperate, even self-destructive” (318). There are a few moments late in the book during which she can’t imagine anyone more monstrous than herself, but she feels these moments briefly. Lemoine notes her childlike ability to shift quickly away from unpleasant thoughts about herself, a habit which causes her to ignore unpleasant realities and give in to her ambitions, such as when she ignores the red flags about Lemoine and takes his money.

By switching between the close interiority of different characters, Catton gives the reader glimpses of Mira from an outside perspective. Rosie thinks with annoyance about Mira’s self-righteousness and arrogance, and this provides a less-glowing alternative view from someone outside Mira’s enthralled circle. In a rare, vulnerable moment, Mira herself notes her fear that Tony will come back having realized she’s nothing special. The moment, however, quickly passes.

Mira is easily manipulated by both Lemoine and Shelley, who know how to use her sense of morality and fluctuating guilt against her. Her small moments of moral compromise add up to a larger betrayal of her entire organization at the end. Her desperate grasping to save herself causes her to get caught up once again in her own ego and ignore Tony’s directions, ultimately getting them caught and killed.

Catton named Shelley Noakes after Mary Shelley to plant Frankenstein (1818) in the readers’ minds, asking if Shelley is the creator or the monster (Interview with Miwa Messer, Poured Over, March 2023). The beginning of the novel depicts Shelley as the “sidekick” of Mira. While Mira lies, steals and grabs at power, Shelley sees the ethical lines drawn for her by society. She “has lived for as long as she could remember in perpetual dread of being dislikable” and so Catton immediately surprises the reader when Shelley tries to seduce Mira’s love interest as the best way out (12). This decision reveals how frustrated she is by her current role in Birnam Wood and being compared to Mira, setting the plot in motion.

Once Shelley makes a grasp at power, something awakens inside her. She becomes attractive, ebullient, and fun in a way that she hasn’t experienced before. That she fails with her seduction isn’t as important as the fact that Shelley doesn’t feel bad about her betrayal and actually feels in her element. The rest of her actions are met with a similar absence of guilt, even when she kills a man, as her sense of morality has been replaced with ambition, highlighting the theme of Ambition as the Root of All Evil.

Once Shelley’s ambition gets her a taste of power, she’s unstoppable, and Lemoine helps her to eliminate Mira from the group. Shelley’s betrayal of Mira at the end by grabbing power of the group, sleeping with Lemoine, and telling on Mira when she’s trying to make her escape with Tony leads directly to their deaths.

Tony Gallo is one of the founding members of Birnam Wood and was Mira’s love interest before he left for a trip to Mexico. He’s passionate about politics and philosophy and helped lay out Birnam Wood’s founding principles. He is the oldest boy from a wealthy family and grew up being the center of attention of his mother and sisters, which contributes to him being an unpopular debater, as he is unable to understand that he flexes his privilege when he argues down his critics. He is self-conscious of his money and intentionally dresses down.

His father’s over-attention to discipline created “a bitter yearning that punishment, for once, should be made to fit the crime” (30). The result is his righteous indignation and a lack of compromise. While the others get into difficulty compromising their morals, his opposite rigidity gets him kicked out of Birnam Wood and into researching the crime over which he loses his life; in this respect, he is the antithesis of Mira in relation to the theme of Compromising Morality in Service to a Cause.

He is, however, not without his ambitions, which are based on the lack of proper justice he felt in his young life. He pictures himself exposing and punishing the guilty not for the benefit of justice being served but for the fame and awards that he will receive. Like all the other characters, his ambition is his undoing.

Robert Lemoine is the antagonist. He is older than the members of Birnam Wood and a billionaire who made his money by manufacturing drones and surveillance technology. His greatest skill is using information for manipulation. Lemoine reads people so that he can exploit their weaknesses for his own gain, like when he sees Shelley’s ruthlessness and uses it to isolate Mira. He is the thematic antithesis of most of the characters when it comes to Compromising Morality in Service to a Cause. While the majority of them compromise their morality, which leads to their downfall, Lemoine is a flatter character whose disinterest in morality rarely leads to a compromise in service to a cause.

Lemoine is similar to the mechanical devices that he uses; through his character, Catton creates an analogy for a computer virus. Everyone he encounters becomes infected with ambition and begins to betray others. He displays little emotion, and while he does feel frustration or annoyance, his behavior is cool and calculated. Where other characters act on whims and according to their passions, Lemoine is robotic and logic-driven.

His backstory and true personality are suspicious; he “loved to present an enigma” (224). Mira and Lemoine are similar in that they like to use aliases, and while Mira revels in creating details for hers, Lemoine uses general assumptions as his covers. When he presents as a horrible billionaire, others think they know him, which allows him to do evil things under their noses, highlighting the thematic idea that Evil Hides in Plain Sight. Being seen as a villain works to his advantage. The irony is that when he attempts to make himself appear better, telling Tony and Mira that his project is legitimate, he fails and falls.

The reader never finds out the truth about his personality, his suspicious family history, and if he actually killed his wife. Like technology itself, he remains a blank screen.

Owen Darvish is a successful businessman who made his money killing rabbits and other pests before inheriting land through his wife. He is self-deprecating, likable, and loves his wife deeply, declaring on the eve of receiving his knighthood that they both deserve it.

His satisfaction in life is disturbed the moment he meets Lemoine. He begins to feel both proud and inferior faced with the billionaire American. He blames this on his national character of feeling like the scrappy underdog whenever global issues arise. Like the other characters, Lemoine has infected him with ambition, which leads him to feel unsatisfied with their business deal and suspicious.

Darvish’s biggest moral trespass comes in the form of ambitiously accepting the knighthood for conservation when he didn’t care about the environment. Lady Darvish admits that the idea of him caring is laughable when he’s spent his life killing animals. This ambition leads him to suspect it in others, and when Tony calls, he is put on his guard, acting out of impulse and out of character by going to the farm. His deviation from character and suspicious action born out of ambition lead to his death.