During my time as a charity chief executive, I remember a very interesting debate with my board of trustees when we were trying to establish formal guidelines for who the organisation would accept funding from. Charity trustees have a duty to focus on what is in the best interests of the charity, regardless of their own personal values and ethics. We concluded that decisions about the appropriateness of potential sponsors and donors should therefore be based only on the publicly stated purpose and values of the organisation and on whether acceptance of funding would be detrimental to the achievement of the organisation's purpose. I was reminded of this debate by Eleanor Catton's novel 'Birnam Wood', which tells the story of a small guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand that is suddenly offered a huge donation by an American tech billionaire. The members of Birnam Wood are faced with the dilemma of weighing their distrust of the donor, his motives and what he stands for against the good they could do for their cause with his money. The novel starts as an intriguing moral and political argument but morphs into an increasingly tense thriller. The reference to 'Macbeth' in the title is clearly not accidental and, while Catton's novel doesn't mirror the plot of the play exactly, it definitely has the feel of a Shakespearean tragedy. Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for her previous novel 'The Luminaries' (reviewed here in December 2013). 'Birnam Wood' is a very different book but equally impressive. The third person narrative voice switches perspectives between the main characters, showing us slightly different understandings of the same events. Cleverly, only we can see that all the protagonists have misunderstood at least one aspect of what is going on. 'Birnam Wood' is a brilliantly written, gripping, intricately-plotted tale, punctuated by three shocking moments that completely took me by surprise.
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