Born in London, Ontario, this author grew up in New Zealand, where this story takes a place, and now lives in Britain. This is not the Birnam Wood of McBeth, but the name of a group of radical socialist environmentalists determined to preserve some portion of the huge real Korowai Park, for eco-friendly farming, and biodiversity. But a knighted owner of a pest control company with a complicated relationship to Birnam Woods, has plans to develop it, and a paranoid American billionaire wants the land to build a self-sustaining, secret doomsday bunker on it. Or at least that is the stated but hush-hush plan. Or is he only interested in the richness of the area in rare earth minerals, or radioactive compounds? None of the plans are straightforward, and everyone is quite prepared to break the law to achieve their goals.
The plot gets extremely complicated with extensive surveillance of everyone by drones, and tracking of phones, and double-crossing lies by almost everyone. I won’t give away the gruesome conclusion of the story except to say that there are LSD trips, multiple casualties, and very circuitous clever coverups.
There are sentences that run on for half a page or more, but the story is realistic and not terribly hard to follow. The bunker story seems to be modelled after the real so-far failed attempts of Peter Thiel of PayPal fame to build one in New Zealand.
This is a damming description of unchecked capitalism at its worst that I quite enjoyed although there is little to admire in the socialist alternative either, at least as depicted here.
4.5/5
Thanks, Mary M.
The Passionate Reader 