Whenever I want to talk about books, I often get the question, ‘but how do you find the time to read?’
My mother once said the response should be, ‘but how do you find the time to breathe?’
Like everyone these days I’ve been busy, busy being a mum, busy paying the bills, busy dealing with tears and tantrums and marking and teaching and laundry and taking the dog for a walk and busy burying chickens and budgies that for no reason whatsoever decided they’d just had enough of this world. But we are all busy, and as we are busy, we are also all just trying to do our best. And so, today, I wanted to get busy again writing about books, or more specifically writing about reading books and how reading to write is also reading to understand communication, the complexities of character, and the causes we champion.
The more I read, the more I read. And the more I read, the more I write, and the more I read and write the more I think about writing, and how to improve my writing. This is important because writing is communicating and sometimes it feels like none of us are doing any of this reading and writing and communicating work very well. Sometimes finding the time to read and write seems as unbelievable as getting a mountain to move.
Nothing communicates the complexities of social change that like the book I’ve just finished reading: Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton1.
“One of the reasons that horticulture held such strong appeal for Mira was that it offered her a respite from this habit of relentless interior critique. When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life.”
― Birnam Wood
.
Birnam Wood is a fictitious guerilla gardening collective based in New Zealand. The gardeners of Birnam Wood are striving for environmental justice while operating on a shoestring budget. When a billionaire doner emerges with tempting offer of land and funding to expand the project concerns are raised about accepting “blood money”2. The characters face a conundrum as their virtuous goals become entangled in a capitalist reality. And so begins a tragedy with historical echoes.
Catton’s title is significant, emerging from Shakespeare’s MacBeth. According to the story, witches prophesized that:
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until / Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him.
Macbeth
In essence: Not until the trees from Birnam Wood approach his castle on Dunsinane Hill would Macbeth be conquered. While Macbeth (quite understandably) never suspected a forest could walk, his logic was proved incorrect when soldiers cut the branches down from Birnam Wood and marched toward him. His logic was flawed.
Catton has reportedly said Birnam Wood is influenced by MacBeth, its characters based on “MacBeth like figures”3. I am no Shakespeare expert, but it is interesting that explorations into the contemporary complexities of conservation, complacency and corruption are best communicated through the structure of 17th century literature. What is said, has been said before.
And so, I continue to read, to understand how to communicate but also to understand where great communication emerges, and where it comes from.
Reading writes the complexities of life, making us realise that even the most ethical life, the most moral and virtuous life is not without flaws. Striving for something unattainable is like trying to move a mountain. Reading about flawed characters helps us recognise something in ourselves. And then we turn to a new page.
Eleanor Catton. 2023. Birnam Wood. Granta: London.
Catton. Birnam Wood. p. 121.
Julian Novitz. 2023. ‘Ambition, corruption and guerilla gardening: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a horror story for our time.’ The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ambition-corruption-and-guerilla-gardening-eleanor-cattons-birnam-wood-is-a-horror-story-for-our-time-195207#:~:text=Catton%20has%20said%20her%20approach,as%20a%20Macbeth%2Dlike%20figure.