Bring me the good scrub: ‘Birnam Wood’
Clare Bucknell, 4 May 2023
Eleanor Catton’s characters enjoy playing other people. Mira Bunting, the twenty-something founder of Birnam Wood, an activist gardening collective, maintains a ‘rotation’ of aliases for undercover purposes. To glean information about a property listing in the small town of Thorndike in New Zealand, she transforms – via a fake email account – into Mrs June...