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Hello, everyone. I'm Gilbert Cruz,

0:40

and this is the Book Review Podcast. Joining

0:43

me this week is the novelist and screenwriter

0:46

Eleanor Kent. In 2013, she

0:48

released her second book, The Luminaries, a

0:51

sprawling story set in 1866 New Zealand, during

0:55

that nation's gold rush period. Critically

0:58

acclaimed, it would go on to win the Booker

1:00

Prize, making her the youngest ever

1:03

winner of that award, which is something that she will

1:05

have to hear or read about herself

1:07

until the end of time. Her latest

1:10

is Burnham Wood, a literary thriller

1:12

set in present-day New Zealand about a

1:14

group of eco-activists, an American

1:16

tech billionaire,

1:18

and the plot of land that they come both to

1:20

share and flashover.

1:24

Eleanor, thank you for being here today to talk about the book.

1:27

Thanks for having me. So I'll start

1:29

not talking about the book, but very quickly, is it weird

1:31

to have a phrase like the youngest ever winner

1:33

of the Booker Prize attached to you

1:36

so early in your career? It really is going to be

1:38

the thing in every article and every,

1:40

it's just, it has to be there.

1:41

Until somebody younger wins it, I

1:44

always mentally add on so far to the end of

1:46

the sentence. Fair point.

1:48

How has that made you think about your

1:50

career, if at all?

1:52

It's a funny kind of thing to have

1:55

to contend with in a way, because nobody can help

1:57

how old they are at any time. It's one of

1:59

the things. we don't have any control over. One

2:02

of the biggest literary influences in my life has

2:04

been Mary Shelley's Frankenstein actually.

2:06

It was a huge influence on the luminaries in

2:08

lots of ways, which Mary Shelley wrote when she

2:10

was 19 years old. So I think

2:13

that I'm pretty much over the hill compared with

2:15

that example. It's something that I have

2:17

thought about a lot, especially with writing Burnham

2:19

Wood, how my

2:21

generational placement or positioning

2:24

has conditioned me.

2:27

The book is designed generationally.

2:29

There are three generations that are represented in

2:31

terms of the points of view. I

2:33

wanted to really explore the generational

2:36

differences in terms of how we deal with certain

2:39

contemporary problems that we're all facing

2:41

globally.

2:42

Definitely something that I've thought a lot about. When

2:45

you put out your first book as this is since

2:47

the luminaries, are you thinking, boy,

2:50

I really have to use an American

2:53

phrase, knock it out of the park

2:54

with this one because of expectations?

2:59

I definitely felt the pressure of the

3:01

follow-up for sure. I didn't really mind

3:03

that pressure. I very much enjoy

3:05

the challenge of having to perform under the gun.

3:09

I don't really mind that. I find it quite exciting. But

3:11

one thing that I did feel after the

3:14

intense media exposure of the years

3:16

after the Booker Prize, I did a lot of traveling.

3:19

I suddenly found myself in a place where, if

3:22

I was to say almost anything at a literary

3:24

festival overseas, it would become a headline

3:26

back home. My wedding when I got

3:28

married became headline news in New Zealand, much

3:31

to my dismay. I'd never told anybody

3:33

that I was getting married who was in the press or anything like

3:36

that. I had to retreat from

3:38

social media in a large way just to

3:40

protect my sanity because I was suddenly

3:43

feeling very exposed and very uncertain about

3:45

that. I think in a way, when

3:48

I finally sat down to write Burnham Wood,

3:51

I had a lot of

3:53

mistrust about the literary establishment.

3:56

I was very uncertain of my position

3:58

there or whether it was somewhere I really could. kind of

4:00

wanted to be. I think as a

4:02

response to that, I set out to write a book that

4:04

was very unashamed in its genre

4:07

aspirations. I wanted to write a book that was

4:09

enjoyable, that was for a reader, that

4:12

wasn't for a critic, that wasn't for an establishment

4:15

or a kind of a literary milieu necessarily,

4:17

but it was just a jolly fun book to

4:19

read.

4:20

So, Burnham Wood is a heavily

4:22

plotted book in very wonderful ways.

4:24

I was wondering if you could lay out the story

4:26

for us.

4:28

The book begins in the aftermath of

4:30

a landslide in a fictional town

4:32

in the South Island of New Zealand where I grew up.

4:35

The landslide has cut off a town and

4:37

caused a plot

4:38

of land which had been

4:40

put up for sale to be covertly

4:42

taken off the market. And

4:44

this arouses the attention of a young

4:46

activist group in New Zealand that call themselves

4:49

Burnham Wood, taking that

4:51

name of course from Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

4:54

Burnham Wood is one of the last prophecies

4:57

Macbeth receives in the play when he becomes addicted

4:59

to receiving prophecies. He

5:02

goes back to the witches for the third time and

5:05

asks them to tell him more about

5:07

the future and they tell him that he will never be

5:09

vanquished until Burnham Wood, this

5:11

forest, comes to Duntson and the castle

5:14

where he lives, which he takes

5:16

to be a statement of impossibility.

5:19

Of course it isn't. There are ways that forests

5:21

can move, but in this state

5:24

that he's in at the end of the play,

5:26

he is

5:27

so certain about his power to

5:29

make the future come about that he can only hear

5:32

it as a statement of certainty. And

5:34

so in my book this Guerrilla Gardening Group,

5:36

a group of eco-activists who go around

5:39

planting sustainable gardens in neglected

5:41

spaces, have called themselves

5:43

Burnham Wood very much because they see themselves

5:46

as in opposition to the Macbeths of

5:48

the world. They see themselves as the thing

5:50

that other people didn't see coming, this

5:53

seemingly fantastical movement

5:56

of natural things or of natural

5:58

processes that of course is not fantastical

6:01

at all. It's entirely achievable and entirely

6:03

human. Their attention is roused

6:06

by this opportunity that they see in this abandoned

6:08

town and they head down

6:10

to this part of New Zealand to see

6:13

if they can use the

6:15

temporary abandonment of this town to their advantage.

6:18

They've reached a point as an organization

6:21

where they've kind of started to split

6:23

into factions, I suppose. There are those

6:25

among the group who

6:27

believe that they

6:29

should stay true to their anti-capitalist roots

6:31

and pursue a path into protest

6:34

action and staging demonstrations

6:36

and so on. There are those who would

6:39

like the group to have a little bit more purchase

6:42

and a little bit more longevity in ways

6:44

that might require them to compromise a

6:47

little bit on their founding principles,

6:49

I suppose. This patch of land

6:51

is a kind of temptation and they come down to

6:53

this abandoned town and their meat, a kind

6:56

of forbidden character, I suppose. This

6:59

tech billionaire you mentioned, his name is Robert

7:01

Lemoine, who has ostensibly

7:03

come to New Zealand in order to build

7:06

a survivalist bunker. He's one

7:09

of the very many of the world's

7:11

ultra wealthy who are buying up lots

7:13

of land in New Zealand and other places as

7:15

a kind of an insurance policy against

7:18

future global catastrophe. He

7:21

eventually makes them an offer of sponsorship,

7:24

essentially, which itself pulls

7:26

the group apart. I suppose in

7:28

a general way, the book is just a meditation

7:31

or a satire on particularly

7:33

New Zealand's relationship with property. It

7:36

involves this young activist collective,

7:38

this billionaire, and then the

7:40

landowners, this baby boomer, kiwi

7:43

couple, all of whom have an interest

7:45

in this land in different ways.

7:47

It's quite a political novel, I

7:50

think. It touches on

7:51

capitalism, of course, on generational

7:54

divides, which you talked about, identity

7:56

politics, climate change, property

7:59

rights,

7:59

internet, social media is a

8:01

long list. The surveillance state, the purity

8:04

of the left, trade-offs between

8:06

sticking to your ideology and trying to make

8:08

yourself sustainable,

8:10

that's quite a lot to fit into one

8:12

book. What was the precipitating

8:14

idea that set you on this path

8:17

that allowed you to sort of expand

8:18

your horizon to take all that stuff

8:20

in? That's such an interesting

8:23

question. There were a couple of moments in

8:25

my life that kind of stuck out with

8:27

me.

8:28

In 2015, I was part of a protest

8:30

march against the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership,

8:33

which was later axed by Donald Trump for Senecee,

8:35

became president. It was a big march in Auckland,

8:38

and quite a significant one for me

8:40

as a fairly young person, because

8:43

there were far many more people marching

8:45

against this in New Zealand than was ever

8:47

reported in the news. The size of

8:50

the crowd was about 10 times the

8:52

number that was reported on the nightly news. But

8:54

there was one thing that happened during that march where

8:56

we were marching down Queen Street in central

8:58

Auckland, and the police in New

9:01

Zealand don't tend to carry guns, such

9:04

that it's quite shocking to me often

9:06

when I'm overseas to see, actually just to see

9:08

guns, because you don't tend to see them at all in

9:10

New Zealand. But instead, at this

9:12

protest march, all of the police lining the

9:14

street had long lens cameras, and

9:17

every couple of seconds, they would just lift

9:19

the camera to their face and take a photo of, like,

9:21

quite intimidatingly, very, very close to people,

9:23

but two or three metres away from them. It

9:25

was incredibly intimidating. It was incredibly chilling,

9:28

this idea that a record was being

9:31

taken of us, exercising

9:33

our democratic right to protest, committing

9:36

no crimes, breaking no laws, but

9:39

our images were being fixed by the police

9:41

for an unknown future purpose, possibly

9:44

blackmail or... You know,

9:46

who knows, you know? And that really

9:48

stuck with me. And so

9:50

when I kind of came to start

9:52

thinking about what themes

9:54

I wanted the book to explore or what territory

9:56

I wanted to occupy,

9:58

I became interested...

9:59

in surveillance almost out of

10:02

that very small moment. It wasn't

10:04

so much that I was interested in surveillance

10:06

capitalism as kind of a grand theme in

10:08

capital letters. I was interested

10:11

in teasing out all of the ways that we conduct

10:14

petty surveillance over one another all the

10:16

time. We're fully capable

10:18

of doing that with all of the open source information

10:20

that's available to us.

10:22

I guess that's how it often happens. There's

10:24

something in an author's personal life

10:27

that sets a spark or nestles

10:29

something in their brain that they'll

10:31

pick up later if you have gone in saying

10:33

I'm going to write a book about

10:36

capitalism, surveillance, the

10:38

rapaciousness of tech billionaires,

10:41

you know, this long list. It would feel overly

10:43

didactic.

10:45

In the forefront of my mind when I was writing this book,

10:47

I was absolutely certain I did

10:49

not want this to be a book that

10:51

flattered a particular

10:53

political point of view.

10:55

I was actually very interested in flattery itself.

10:58

I wanted to write the book as a satire or

11:01

at least a book that begins satirically

11:03

and then bends towards something else as the book

11:05

goes on. I was thinking a lot about

11:07

the ways that we

11:09

are, I just flattered

11:11

constantly through the

11:13

algorithms that we're interacting with

11:16

every day on our computers. These

11:19

algorithms are making what are essentially

11:21

kind of moral choices for us. They're making choices

11:23

in terms of what they're going to show

11:26

us. But those choices

11:28

are flattering the image of

11:30

ourselves that they already have. They're smoothing

11:32

the way towards us

11:34

only ever

11:35

finding what we expect to

11:37

find whenever we conduct internet

11:40

search or open a news app or whatever

11:42

it is. I had just become very worried

11:45

about this and it was dovetailing into

11:47

another stream of research

11:49

into the book, which was into the nature of psychopaths

11:52

actually. I really wanted my tech

11:54

billionaire character to conform to a

11:56

psychopathic profile. I was reading

11:58

a lot of books about psychopaths. psychopathy and sociopathy.

12:02

It occurred to me that what a psychopath

12:04

does when they are interacting with a person

12:06

who they're seeking to manipulate, you

12:08

could argue it's exactly what an

12:10

algorithm does. They are

12:12

shape shifters. They're conforming themselves to what

12:15

they believe that you want. But

12:17

they are also hiding an agenda

12:20

from you. Often it's an advertising or a

12:22

profit-seeking agenda. And

12:24

they are treating their interaction with

12:26

you as a zero-sum game, almost

12:29

exactly the same way as an algorithm

12:31

does in terms of wanting to capture

12:33

your attention and essentially

12:35

kind of make you addicted to whatever it is that you're

12:37

looking at. Out of all of that,

12:40

weirdly, came an idea for a novel.

12:42

Not that any of this would be explicit

12:44

on the page, but I wanted the book

12:46

to be alive with

12:49

the kinds of

12:50

human interactions, conversations,

12:54

persuasions, seductions, that

12:57

can only happen in face-to-face

12:59

interaction. And so I wanted to create

13:02

the anti-algorithmic novel,

13:04

in a sense. I wanted this to be kind of an old-fashioned

13:06

book, a book of character and action, where

13:08

the character's actions really mattered, that

13:10

the character's choices really mattered. It

13:13

was kind of my way of standing up for the

13:15

human as opposed to the algorithm.

13:18

You mentioned, after you wrote

13:20

The Luminaries, just taking

13:22

on a higher profile and having personal

13:25

details make their way out into the press or

13:27

onto the internet. I have to imagine,

13:30

correct me if I'm wrong, that some of that fed

13:33

into particularly the social media aspects

13:35

of this book. There's one, I'm not

13:37

saying this ever happened to you, this particular part, but there's one

13:39

part in the book where one of the main characters, Tony,

13:42

goes to Mexico, writes possibly

13:44

an ill-advised essay,

13:46

and then, as happens so often, is

13:48

completely

13:49

excoriated on Twitter and the internet,

13:51

hashtag whiteprivilege, hashtag

13:54

poverty tourism, and his life

13:56

is sort of ruined, at least for the moment. Eventually

13:59

he finds himself sort of slinking back to New Zealand.

14:02

Your circumstance and his are completely

14:04

different, but I have to think there is something about the way

14:06

that the internet and social media

14:08

collapses space and time

14:11

and makes your personal life feel, if

14:13

you are someone of any note or even a regular

14:15

person,

14:16

feels so accessible to others, and

14:18

that's scary. You see

14:20

so many instances these days of

14:23

people who are embarrassed of something

14:25

that they've posted online, just simply reaching

14:28

back into the past and deleting it, and

14:30

in circumstances where you can't do

14:32

that, where something kind of explodes before you

14:34

can delete it or explodes, you delete

14:37

it and then it doesn't matter, there's

14:38

this kind of sense of indelible

14:40

shame of it, the sense that these

14:43

utterances can't decay. They're not subject

14:46

to the ravages of time

14:48

and memory that are actually a very important

14:50

part of being human, I think. There's something about the

14:52

fact that everything is preserved forever, but

14:55

also that deletion is possible

14:57

online. Neither of those things are

14:59

remotely human.

15:02

They're constructs that I don't

15:04

really think that they're very good for us. One of

15:06

the nonfiction books I read in research for

15:08

this book actually was Edward Snowden's book,

15:11

Permanent Record. He has this really

15:13

intriguing chapter in the early part of the

15:15

book where he talks about as a computer

15:17

programmer, you learn essentially

15:19

three commands or functions, which

15:22

is to read, to write, and to execute. This

15:24

is what you can teach a computer to do.

15:26

He points out that missing from

15:28

that list of commands is

15:30

the command to delete.

15:32

Actually, we think of deletion as

15:34

something that is very permanent whenever we

15:36

do it, but in fact, it's

15:38

an illusion.

15:39

What you're doing when you delete a file is you're just teaching

15:42

your computer, you're instructing your computer

15:44

to use the space that was formally occupied

15:47

by that file as blank space,

15:49

so just to pretend that it's blank. But

15:51

it doesn't really say that that has stopped existing.

15:54

And I found that really fascinating because I think

15:56

that we have this

15:58

mania for deleting.

15:59

even the word cancellation,

16:02

it's such a digital word, it's such a contemporary

16:04

word. A word that is sprung up because

16:07

of our dependence on these

16:09

social media environments, where we're spending more

16:11

and more of our time. It's an

16:13

illusion, it's this convention, it's this habit

16:16

that we have wanting to eliminate

16:18

somebody because we dislike what it is

16:21

that they represent.

16:22

There's a quote from your book,

16:24

like on social media, I was just posting

16:27

all sorts of stuff.

16:28

They say a word other than stuff. It makes me

16:30

feel sick, not because it was hateful, not at all,

16:32

just because it was so, so blatantly

16:34

out of touch. Not with back

16:37

then, but with right now.

16:39

The idea that, and then I think they say, and

16:41

this was just four years ago, you feel ashamed

16:43

about something that you said or believe or

16:46

uttered or posted or put out into the world.

16:48

Four years ago, maybe you're a different

16:50

person, maybe not if one believes that people don't

16:52

really change, but because it's out there on social

16:55

media, it makes you

16:56

feel differently about yourself and

16:58

your beliefs and was

17:00

I a different person then? Why did I say that? I

17:03

passionately believe that people can and

17:05

do change. Sometimes they don't, but

17:08

they can. I think that anybody

17:10

who believes in a plotted

17:12

novel has to believe that because

17:15

what plotters has changed, it's moving

17:17

through time in a meaningful way.

17:19

It's just humanity, I think, to take

17:21

our cues from these online spaces.

17:24

I refuse to call them platforms because I

17:26

feel very strongly that the word platform

17:28

is a propaganda term, because it

17:31

seems to suggest a featureless space

17:33

that has only one purpose, which is to elevate,

17:36

and that's it. It has no other agenda. I

17:38

can call them social media environments, that's all right.

17:40

But even that is quite polite.

17:45

We'll be right back.

17:52

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18:26

I'm Alayna Bergeron. Hello. I'm

18:28

John Branch. I'm a designer for the New York Times. I

18:31

write for the Times. Okay, good. What fascinates

18:33

me about basketball sneakers is how

18:35

they can be markers of both high fashion and

18:38

performance.

18:38

You know when you hear the squeaking sounds

18:41

of sneakers on a basketball court? There's a scientific

18:43

principle behind that called stick slip.

18:45

I talked to Melody Asani. She's

18:47

designing these incredibly ornate basketball

18:50

shoes. She's also one of the very few

18:52

women to design sneakers for the biggest

18:54

male athletes.

18:55

Every time a sneaker grabs a hardwood

18:57

floor, it's sticking and unsticking,

19:00

sticking, unsticking, creating a sound.

19:03

When I look at a basketball sneaker, I

19:05

see design that's impacting our culture at

19:07

so many different levels besides just

19:09

sports.

19:09

When I started reporting on why sneakers

19:11

squeak, I came to understand that we hear

19:14

this type of sound all around us. From the

19:16

strings of a violin to car tires, even

19:18

the spiny lobster.

19:19

The New York Times. Explore

19:22

how we bring more of life to life. At nytimes.com

19:25

slash life. Welcome

19:28

back to the Book Review Podcast. I'm Gilbert

19:30

Cruz and I'm here with Eleanor Catton whose

19:32

new book, Burnham Wood, is out now.

19:36

I'd like to read a short passage

19:38

from your book. It's about New Zealand. At

19:42

the same time, however, he wanted desperately

19:45

to see the man cut down to size. And

19:47

in this, he felt even more acutely kiwi.

19:50

He was long accustomed to regarding his country

19:52

as an automatic underdog,

19:54

as a righteous, plucky, decent, and

19:57

fundamentally good natured contender.

19:59

disadvantage in any instance of

20:02

unflattering international comparison

20:04

by its small population,

20:06

its short history,

20:07

and its geographical remoteness from the great

20:09

power centers of the world,

20:11

a habit

20:12

of defensive self-exception,

20:14

massed a fear of its nation's insignificance.

20:19

Tell me about what it's like to be from

20:22

New Zealand. Obviously, this is from the perspective

20:24

of one character in particular who may be

20:26

overstating things, but

20:28

this book is particularly rooted in the fact that

20:30

you live for most of your life in New Zealand, which is a

20:32

place I feel like, at least for many

20:34

Americans, is they have good wine and

20:37

I

20:37

saw it in Lord of the Rings, so maybe I'll go there

20:40

for a vacation

20:41

one day. But at least

20:43

in this one character you really sort of try to

20:45

get to

20:47

what is the nature of being a resident of this

20:49

small island out

20:51

there

20:52

far away from so many things.

20:54

It was something I wanted to explore in the book, the

20:57

question of complicity and the degree to

20:59

which

21:00

New Zealanders feel complicit in

21:02

global injustice, which in

21:04

my experience is not very much at all. There's

21:07

a sort of a habit of self-exemption

21:10

that goes on in New Zealand often. One

21:12

thing that I often notice is that you very often

21:15

hear New Zealanders defining their country in

21:17

the negative rather than in the positive.

21:19

And so if you ask somebody about New Zealand culture,

21:21

they'll begin by describing something overseas

21:23

and then they'll just say, oh, well, we're just not like

21:26

that. So they'll say, you know how things

21:28

are formal in the UK or there's a class structure in

21:30

the UK. Oh, we don't have that in New Zealand. Or

21:32

they'll make a comparison with Australia, with the United

21:35

States. It's very difficult to I

21:37

think often get New Zealanders to come up

21:39

with a very positive statement about what the country

21:41

is all about.

21:43

I think that that's solidified over time into

21:45

this kind of very odd sense of supremacy

21:48

actually. It's kind of born out of an

21:50

inferiority complex. But like

21:52

many inferiority complexes, it manifests

21:55

as a superiority complex.

21:58

I feel fairly alive to it.

21:59

kind of attuned to it because I'm married to

22:02

an American, a

22:03

man from Chicago, and my father's

22:05

side of the family is also American. They

22:07

came to New Zealand in the early 1970s because

22:10

they feared a nuclear event, and

22:13

New Zealand was nuclear free, of course. That was kind of

22:15

what had brought them there initially.

22:18

I think this is a book that does a great job at

22:20

putting us in the heads of

22:21

multiple characters, those characters

22:23

often have clashing interests and motives.

22:26

One of the great things you do when

22:28

dealing with time and point of view in this book, you

22:30

present a scene and then you switch to another character

22:32

at a moment just in time before

22:34

the one we read so that we are

22:37

experiencing it but with more information

22:39

than they have. And I was just

22:41

curious structurally

22:44

how you came up with that way of parsling

22:47

out information.

22:49

It actually came from Macbeth. It came from reading

22:51

and rereading Macbeth, the play, and noticing

22:54

how ingeniously the scenes are structured

22:56

in that play to always be giving

22:59

you as the audience or as the reader

23:01

a

23:02

slight advantage or disadvantage

23:04

relative to the characters in the scene

23:06

that follows. For example, at

23:09

the beginning of the play you learn that the witches

23:11

are going to meet Macbeth before they do. You

23:14

learn that Macbeth is going to get a promotion before

23:16

he himself learns that. You

23:18

learn that he's coming home to his wife

23:20

before he does come home. In

23:23

each of these transitions you're getting

23:25

a little sense of what

23:27

the immediate future is for

23:30

the play, for the characters within the play.

23:33

And so there's this very interesting way

23:35

in which Shakespeare is almost cultivating

23:37

a kind of futurity or

23:40

a sense of the future in you as the audience.

23:42

He's creating a kind of a foreknowledge

23:44

in you that then is born out in the

23:47

action. I was so excited about this

23:49

when I first noticed it and was seeing how

23:51

it was contributing to in a way

23:53

seducing you into becoming Macbeth

23:57

in a sense, becoming more and more like him

23:59

to... be taking these statements about

24:02

the future as certainties when of course

24:04

they aren't certainties, no statement about the future

24:06

as a certainty.

24:07

I really wanted to emulate that. I wanted to

24:09

create situations where when

24:11

you move from one person's point of view to another,

24:14

you have a memory of an

24:16

intention or a decision that they've

24:19

made or an ulterior motive

24:21

that they hold that radically changes

24:23

how you're now experiencing

24:26

being in another person's point of view. And

24:29

this is one of the things that I think a novel

24:31

can do in a way that almost no other

24:33

art form can do. I think even film and television,

24:35

as wonderful as they are, just don't ever quite come

24:38

close to that sense of being both fully

24:40

inhabiting a character but also so

24:43

aware of what that character appears

24:46

like from the outside to the other

24:48

characters that you're kind of both inside and outside

24:50

at the same time.

24:52

Now in the past decade you've also

24:55

worked as a screenwriter. You

24:57

adapted your own book, The Luminaries. You

25:00

also worked on an adaptation of the

25:02

Jane Austen novel, Emma.

25:04

How do you have to think about structure

25:06

differently? How do you have to think about

25:08

how you reveal character

25:10

differently when you're working on a film

25:12

or TV project? I

25:15

think that working in both forms has led me

25:18

to this greater appreciation of what

25:20

drama is in a way that has

25:23

applicability in both forms. The

25:25

big difference is our industry-related.

25:28

When you write a screenplay, you're commissioned

25:30

to do a job and you're not

25:32

terribly powerful in that. You're

25:35

a plumber that's been called in to do a job in somebody's

25:37

house, but it's not your house. And

25:39

when the job is done, you're going to hand over the occupancy

25:42

to other people. Whereas in a novel,

25:44

you are this ultimate tyrant in a

25:46

way. You don't have to answer to anybody at all.

25:48

You don't have to answer to a schedule or a budget

25:51

or the whims or ideas or capabilities

25:53

of any other artist. And

25:55

both of those things come with their pleasures and their

25:58

difficulties, I suppose.

26:00

One thing that I've really enjoyed

26:03

learning about as a screen writer and then kind of

26:05

importing that knowledge back to my

26:07

work as a fiction writer is

26:09

a greater understanding of action

26:12

and how action and character,

26:14

I think in a well-made drama, are

26:17

essentially the same thing.

26:19

You are what you do in a way that

26:21

is

26:22

far more fundamental than

26:25

anything that you can say about yourself. If

26:27

I say I am a shy person

26:29

and then I go off and do something that's

26:32

incredibly exhibitionist, who I

26:34

am is what I've done.

26:35

And I think that that distinction is really

26:38

interesting, actually coming back to the internet that we

26:40

were talking about before. It's

26:42

very interesting when you take it back to social media

26:45

because on social media there is no

26:47

difference between saying something and doing

26:49

it.

26:51

But of course the difference in fiction

26:53

and it's very present in Burnham

26:55

Wood is that

26:56

you can through perspective and

26:59

point of view show us that someone

27:01

does something or says something but

27:03

really is someone else or believes

27:05

something else or has

27:07

literally the opposite motive

27:09

in their head at the same time. That

27:11

is sort of the thing that you can do in fiction that you can't

27:14

in film or TV unless there's voiceover which

27:16

is really hard to manage.

27:18

What fiction can do

27:20

amazingly also is to show the connection

27:23

between an intention and an action, then

27:25

an action and a consequence.

27:29

And to follow those things through and

27:31

to show how things turn out differently

27:33

than how we intend,

27:35

that gives us a way of understanding

27:38

human impact I think and the fullness

27:41

of life in a way that it's very

27:43

difficult to do in any other form.

27:46

Okay so listeners we're going to

27:48

do something a little odd

27:50

here and I want to give you all a heads up. We're

27:52

going to go into heavy plot details here about the

27:55

end of the book. It's not something we usually do

27:57

but

27:58

I need to talk about it and I don't want to

27:59

ruin the book for anyone who hasn't made it to

28:02

the end yet. So this is pure

28:04

spoiler territory, as they say in movie

28:06

and TV land.

28:07

And this is your warning. So if you don't want to know

28:09

what happens at the end of Burnham wood, you should

28:12

press pause and come back and listen to

28:14

the rest of the conversation after you've

28:16

finished the book.

28:17

And if you don't do that, that is your fault. That is not

28:19

my fault. I'm going to give you a few seconds. Okay.

28:26

Everyone dies. And

28:29

it's quite shocking. Quite abrupt. When

28:31

did you know you were going to

28:33

do that? From before

28:35

the beginning. So I always knew that how

28:38

that was the way that I wanted the book to end.

28:40

There were two reasons for it really. The

28:42

first was that I had been very sure

28:44

from the very beginning of writing the book that I wanted

28:46

it to behave like a satire. And I

28:49

felt that to, to let anybody survive

28:51

at the end of the book

28:52

would be to

28:53

automatically to suggest that that person

28:55

was exempt from the satire in a different

28:58

way. There's something about the fact

29:00

that everybody has the same end in a

29:02

sense that hopefully

29:04

would make you turn back to the earlier part

29:06

of the book and think, okay, well, where the hell did this all

29:09

go wrong

29:10

and shine a light ideally

29:13

on all of the little incremental decisions

29:15

that each of these characters make these actions

29:18

that then end up contributing to this

29:20

highly avertible tragedy at

29:23

the end. It really didn't have to happen. That

29:26

was as much of a political

29:29

statement as I felt that I was willing to make in the

29:31

book

29:31

as if to say, yes, we're facing

29:34

down devastation. Yes, we're

29:36

facing down this crucial future

29:38

in which there are no survivors,

29:41

but it's avertible. We were not there yet.

29:44

But the other reason actually was I was thinking a little

29:46

bit more about Shakespearean

29:48

tragic form

29:49

had been thinking a lot about how

29:52

Macbeth as a tragedy has

29:54

actually really quite a remarkable number of people

29:57

still alive at the end of the play. Yeah.

29:59

The witches are still alive.

29:59

alive, which they don't have to be. I

30:02

was thinking you could imagine another version of the

30:04

play where Macbeth or in fact

30:06

Macduff gets so cross at the witches

30:09

or gets so enraged that they go and slaughter

30:11

them. Of course, fliance, who

30:14

is prophesied to become king one day,

30:16

and also Malcolm, who is on the

30:19

throne at the end of the play, are both alive. So

30:21

there's this uncertainty, this open-endedness

30:23

with the fact that they're still alive. And

30:26

I was thinking about this idea of open-endedness

30:28

and whether that felt

30:29

appropriate to me and

30:31

kind of decided to use this finality

30:35

as a way of

30:36

maybe shocking people out of the

30:38

sense of

30:40

complacency, I think, that we've all grown

30:42

to have about a future

30:44

that is very dark and is rushing at us

30:47

very fast. We've all

30:49

come to have this attitude that of course, you know, everything's

30:51

going to go up in flames very quickly. So

30:54

I kind of wanted to take you there to kind of make

30:56

you go, oh, God, okay.

30:58

Did any of your first or second readers try to

31:00

dissuade you from this ending? Well,

31:03

I was writing it. I was very gleefully going around telling

31:05

people that I was writing a book where everybody died at the end.

31:08

And then at some point my husband said, I think

31:10

you should stop telling people because you might be

31:12

slightly ruining the effect. But

31:15

I honestly didn't know who was going to

31:18

die in what order and how

31:20

they were going to die.

31:21

I just knew that I wanted everybody to be dead by the

31:24

end.

31:25

My breakthrough point

31:27

came when I started thinking

31:29

about should this be a situation of murder

31:31

or should it be manslaughter?

31:33

And I ended up going with a kind of a manslaughter that

31:35

then escalates.

31:37

And I started thinking about the fact that we

31:39

are often

31:40

far more likely to

31:43

do something really terrible

31:45

when we're covering up for something that

31:47

we don't really feel like it was our fault.

31:50

Shelley, for example, who accidentally kills

31:52

Sir Owen in the book and then Mira, who helps to

31:54

cover it up.

31:55

I don't really feel like either of those young women

31:58

would be capable of murder.

32:00

But in

32:01

covering up the manslaughter, in protecting

32:04

themselves, I think that they're capable

32:06

of so much worse than they ever would have been in

32:08

the beginning. And that started to interest

32:11

me because I started thinking about that

32:13

in political terms, that when we become convinced

32:16

that we are in the right, as many of us do feel

32:18

convinced, aided by these echo chambers

32:20

that we're living in online, it

32:23

then kind of authorizes us to behave

32:25

in worse and worse

32:26

behaviors.

32:28

We wouldn't have done that if we hadn't had that early

32:31

vindication or, I don't know, sense of, even

32:33

sense of martyrdom, you know. Just to

32:36

come back to something you raised earlier about Tony's

32:39

public shaming online, that felt

32:41

very important to his character because I think only

32:43

somebody with something like that in their past would

32:45

have that much righteous

32:48

indignation and energy that then could go

32:50

so terribly awry.

32:52

And it definitely persists throughout the novel.

32:55

You can hold the thought that there is a worse person

32:57

in the book, the tech billionaire who does

32:59

a lot of bad things, but no one annoys me

33:01

more than Tony. Oh, good. It's

33:03

like, God, just shut up. Just stop.

33:06

Enough.

33:06

There's a quote

33:08

from one of the great movies, The

33:10

Big Lebowski, where

33:11

Jeff Bridges says to John Goodman's character, you're

33:14

not wrong, Walter. You're just an a-hole. And

33:17

that is, that's Tony. Some of the things he

33:19

says, not wrong. He's just, he doesn't know how

33:21

to say it in a way that doesn't turn people off.

33:24

This is a huge problem, I think, for the

33:26

left.

33:27

The insistence on purity, which

33:29

I think you kind of find everywhere on the left,

33:32

there's often this

33:33

always kind of haughtiness that you find

33:35

where people don't really know what to do when the messenger

33:38

is not somebody who they would like.

33:40

I think there's often this great

33:42

emotional immaturity as well that you

33:45

often find in somebody like Tony where he thinks

33:48

that there's right and there's wrong and he doesn't realize

33:50

that you can be right in the wrong way or you

33:52

can be right up until the point that

33:55

you're wrong because you've talked about being right

33:57

too much.

33:59

you can be wrong, but

34:02

then somebody can wrong you, and then all of

34:04

a sudden you become right. I mean, morality is just

34:06

so muddy.

34:08

He makes so many mistakes over the course of

34:10

the book, and in some ways is the

34:13

architect of almost everything that happens. His

34:16

last action in the book is to burn down a national

34:18

park. I mean, this is pretty much the worst

34:20

thing that happens. He feels like he's going out a hero

34:23

when he does it in some way. Right. Yeah.

34:25

It's the question I wanted to ask with that final

34:27

action is, is it justified

34:30

to call attention to something? If by

34:32

calling attention to this gross injustice

34:35

that's going on, you then destroy something

34:38

even bigger,

34:39

that's a question for a lot of protest movements.

34:42

Is it justified? I mean, I don't really know the answer because

34:44

it would depend on the circumstance.

34:47

Boy, this has been a meaty

34:50

conversation. It's a meaty book, and

34:52

I appreciate you coming on to talk to us about

34:54

it. Thank you, Ellie, for being on

34:56

today.

34:56

Thank you so much. It was really fun.

35:00

That was my conversation with Eleanor Catton

35:02

about her new literary thriller, Burnham

35:04

Wood. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor

35:06

of the New York Times Book Review.

35:08

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