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Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton Books

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The Luminaries

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Birnam Wood

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The Rehearsal

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“Like, no one ever actually knows what the right thing to do is. I mean, you can think that you know what’s right, and you can tell yourself that you know, but at the point that you make your choice, like, in the moment, you’re never really certain. You just hope. You just act and you hope for the best, and maybe it turns out that you did the right thing, or maybe it turns out that you didn’t—in which case, all you can say is that at least you tried. But, like, the wrong thing to do, that’s often much clearer. Wrong is, like, easier to see than right, a lot of the time. It’s more definite—like, this is the line I know I will not cross, this is what I absolutely will not do.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Mira. ‘I see that.’ ‘So anyway,’ Shelley went on, ‘this is what I was thinking: that, like, the real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices, are never between what’s right and what’s easy. They’re between what’s wrong and what’s hard.”

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Book:Birnam Wood
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“The Gallos had always kept a frugal household, and it hadn’t been until Tony went abroad that he realised that what he had always taken to be middle class was really, by any global standard, rich. The revelation had produced in him not relief or gratitude, but a new and deeply unpleasant sense of his own complicity, for Grandpa Gallo's legacy--a fortune he had never known existed, let alone expected to receive--had left him suddenly much wealthier than any of his friends. He had never mentioned the bequest to anyone; instead, he practised inconspicuous consumption, and began to cultivate a shabby hand-me-down appearance as a way of implying to everyone around him that, like them, he was only barely scraping by. It was partly to atone for this deception, and partly in continuation of it, that he had turned to journalism; having pretended for so long that the asceticism of his lifestyle was a sacrifice he had no other option but to make, he now felt an almost desperate desire to earn an income from his writing, and thereby prove in concrete terms that his life’s project, the expansion of his mind, was more than what he feared it might be--merely a form of inauthentic tourism financed, hypocritically, by those very social and economic structures that he claimed so energetically to oppose.”

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Book:Birnam Wood
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“So what is it about billionaires and survivalism?’ she’d asked him, the third or fourth time they met. ‘Is it just an arms race? Like, just a pissing contest? Or do you all know something that we don’t?’ ‘Both,’ he said, quite calmly. ‘I mean, of course it’s a pissing contest. What isn’t?’ She tried to think of something that wasn’t, then decided that that was too predictable. ‘So what do you know that the rest of us don’t?’ she said instead. ‘I know how easy it was,’ said Lemoine. Mira didn’t follow. ‘How easy what was?’ ‘All of it,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Getting rich. Staying rich. Winning. It was all so easy. I just took what I wanted, and it was mine. I said what I wanted, and people got it for me. I did what I wanted, and nobody stopped me. So simple. And if it was easy for me, then it could be easy for anybody, and that’s a very frightening thought. Apart from anything else, it would be untenable. Everyone can’t be on top, or it wouldn’t be the top any more, would it? That’s just a fact.’ ‘And I’ve been in the citadels of power,’ he added. ‘I’ve eaten at the high tables; I’ve seen behind the doors that never open. Everyone’s the same. You reach a certain level and it’s all exactly the same: it’s all just luck and loopholes and being in the right place at the right time, and compound growth taking care of the rest. That’s why we’re all building barricades. It’s in case the rest of you ever figure out how incredibly easy it was for us to get to where we are.’ ‘Jesus,’ Mira said. ’That’s fucking dark.’ ‘Well, if you get too depressed, remember that it’s also just a pissing contest.”

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Book:Birnam Wood
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“And what’s even more fucked up is that you totally have it in your power to make things better. Like, in all of history, there has literally never been a group of people better equipped to avert catastrophe than the billionaires alive today. The technology you have access to, and the resources, and the money, and the influence, and the connections—literally, no one in history has ever been more powerful. Ever.’ ‘Yes. We’re like gods,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘But gods can be capricious, Mira. They don’t always do what you want them to. They move in mysterious ways.”

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“Tonight shall be the very beginning.' 'Was it?' 'It shall be. For me.' 'My beginning was the albatrosses.' 'That is a good beginning; I am glad it is yours. Tonight shall be mine.' 'Ought we to have different ones?' 'Different beginnings? I think we must.' 'Will there be more of them?' 'A great many more. Are your eyes closed?' 'Yes. Are yours?' 'Yes. Though it's so dark it hardly makes a difference.' 'I feel—more than myself.' 'I feel—as though a new chamber of my heart has opened.' 'Listen.' 'What is it?' 'The rain.”

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Book:The Luminaries
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“What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end. And after Pisces? Out of the womb, the bloody birth. We do not follow: we cannot cross from last to first. Aries will not admit a collective point of view, and Taurus will not relinquish the subjective. Gemini's code is an exclusive one. Cancer seeks a source, Leo, a purpose, and Virgo, a design; but these are projects undertaken singly. Only in the zodiac's second act will we begin to show ourselves: in Libra, as a notion, in Scorpio, as a quality, and in Sagittarius, as a voice. In Capricorn we will gain memory, and in Aquarius, vision; it is only in Pisces, the last and oldest of the zodiacal signs, that we acquire a kind of selfhood, something whole. But the doubled fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ourobouros of mind—both the will of fate, and the fated will—and the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, door-less, and mortared from within. These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour.”

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“The political rout of 2016 had brought with it a new mood of deference towards the radically unforeseen. Around the globe, forecasters had been chastened and experts maligned; in their place had come the disruptors, the technological imperialists, the metadata millenarians and stokers of popular feeling who had managed, invisibly and hitherto impossibly, to manufacture the authentic, the world's most influential brand.”

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“Lady Darvish nodded sagely to herself. She believed, quite frankly and unapologetically, that women were superior to men; it seemed merely obvious to her that women’s minds were subtler than men’s, more flexible, more capacious, more resilient, and more socially and circumstantially astute, and to those who might doubt that a disparity between the sexes existed in the first place, or indeed, that one could speak of two such categories at all, she would only shake her head and laugh, and say emphatically that raising her daughter could not have been more different from raising her two sons: ‘They were like two different species,’ she would say, ‘I mean—I’m telling you. Talk about “Men are from Mars”!’ But it was as a consequence of her belief in the supremacy of her own sex that she held men to far lower standards than she did women, and so tended to be rather softer on them; with Sir Owen—as with her sons, and with her father before he’d died—her attitude of condescension could take the form of a cosseting, and even an obsequious, indulgence.”

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“Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.' 'I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna said. 'No, no,' the boy said. 'Oh, no. Solitude is best enjoyed in company.' He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. 'Especially the company of one other soul,' he added, turning back to the sea. 'It's dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I'm not.”

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“…perhaps, he reflected now, he’d been trying to atone somehow for what had happened at the hui, to prove to himself that he was not just yet another Marxist intellectual cliché, not just yet another armchair critic with soft hands and smug opinions, who theorised about the working class while never having done a day of drudge work in his life. Tony was very proud to be well read, and had often railed against the defensive anti-intellectualism that defined his country’s culture, but he had nevertheless recognised in himself, at times, a deep desire to perform a kind of excessive rugged practicality in compensation for his bookishness, submitting himself to physical privations, testing his strength and his endurance well beyond what was called for, and devising circuitous home-made solutions to problems that could be solved much more easily, and often more cheaply, by paying someone else to fix them. It hadn’t been until he’d gone abroad that he’d been able to identify this trait as itself peculiarly Kiwi, reflecting a broader attitude held among his countrymen that to do a thing with effort was always more respectable than to have it done with ease; inconvenience, in New Zealand, tended to be treated as a test of character, such that it was a point of national pride to be able to withstand discomfort or poor service without giving in to the temptation to complain.”

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Book:Birnam Wood
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“He was so staggered that he started to laugh, but his laughter subsided almost at once, and in its place he felt a wave of fury and despair roll over him at the sheer inexorability of late-capitalist degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more—a familiar surge of grief and helpless rage at the reckless, wasteful, soulless, narcissistic, barren selfishness of the present day, and at his own political irrelevance and impotence, and at the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life—‘real life,’ Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”

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Book:Birnam Wood
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“I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting," says Julia, "like biting your lip and looking away just a second too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted symbol I can think of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip, and what I am trying to say. We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering. We are speaking someone else’s lines. It’s a comfort.”

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Book:The Rehearsal
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“…as she cycled home Shelley reflected that in all her years at Birnam Wood she had never quite mastered the skill of knowing in every individual circumstance whether to overplay or underplay her expertise. It was something that Mira seemed to know instinctively—that a demonstrated competency reassured some people and aggravated others; she could pitch herself at exactly the right point between whimsical amateur and winsome entrepreneur, a performance that, when Shelley tried it, only seemed to make it much less likely that the person she was talking to would want to give her things for free.”

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“He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned toward him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down... Devlin came closer...He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem. So they are lovers, he thought, looking down at them. So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping.”

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“...Emery Staines, lost to meditation, doubts his own intentions, his natural frankness having accepted very readily the fact of his desire, and the fact of his delight, and the ease with which his pleasure might be got, expressions that cause him no shame, but that nevertheless give him pause, for he feels, whatever the difference in their respective stations, a certain bond with Anna Wetherell, a connexion, by virtue of which he feels less, rather than more, complete, in the sense that her nature, being both oppositional to and in accord with his own, seems to illumine those internal aspects of his character that his external manner does not or cannot betray, leaving him feeling both halved and doubled, or in other words, doubled when in her presence, and halved when out of it, and as a consequence he becomes suddenly doubtful of those qualities of frankness and good-natured curiosity upon which he might ordinarily have acted, without doubt and without delay; these meditations being interrupted, frequently, by a remark of Joseph Pritchard's —'if it weren't for her debt, her dependency, she'd have had a dozen propositions from a dozen men'—that keeps returning, uncomfortably and without variation, to his mind.”

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“There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough--and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.”

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“Any conversation on the left these days, it's always so competitive, it's always each person trying to outperform the person before them in terms of their oppression or their lack of privilege or their personal trauma or, like, the fact that actually they’re Jewish or actually they’re bisexual, or guess what, they’re a quarter this or that ethnicity, which gives them the right to speak or the right to take offence or whatever. It’s a marketplace! Yet again! You can dress it up in the language of sensitivity and social justice and blah blah blah, but the point of intersectionality isn’t to learn how to transcend our differences, or eliminate them, the point isn’t solidarity, it’s about shoring up your brand, cornering the market, everyone out for themselves, maximising profit and minimising risk—' ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ Amber said. ‘It locks us into our differences,’ Tony said, ‘it’s segregationist. And it’s also just advertising. It’s brand management. That’s my point. We’re still inside the fucking paradigm!”

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“... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life - 'real life', Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing 'real' beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”

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“(Nor was Shelley’s dad of any interest to Mira as an adversary. He was a mortgage broker with an irritable disposition who was always, in the family parlance, ‘in a rage’--an infirmity openly encouraged, as Mira pointed out, by his wife, who indeed devoted an unusual proportion of her daily conversation to reminding her husband of the many kinds of people in the world whom he disliked. That this list, which included vegans, slow walkers, loudmouths, ostentatious breast-feeders, people of indeterminate gender, buskers, bad drivers, and the unwashed, covered in one way or another the entire membership of Birnam Wood, Mira did not appear to find insulting. She saw Shelley’s father as a creature of his wife’s devising, not an autonomous adult, but a hapless pawn designed by Mrs Noakes for the solitary purpose of throwing her own, more vivid personality into greater relief--a plainly narcissistic exercise of which she, Mira, could not remotely see the appeal.)”

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“It is perfectly serendipitous,' said the boy, descending the steps to the street. 'Fancy that—us meeting a second time! Of course I have wished for it, very much—but they were vain wishes; the kind one makes in twilight states, you know, idly. I remember just what you said, as we rounded the heads of the harbor—in the dawn light. "I should like to see him in a storm," you said. I have thought of it many times, since; it was the most delightfully original of speeches.' Anna blushed at this: not only had she never heard herself described as an original before, she had certainly never supposed that her utterances qualified as 'speeches.”

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“Cowell Devlin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical—angelic patronage, invitations into paradise—and Anna's story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna's acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead—he was only missing? He was sending her 'messages' that proved the depth of his love—and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl's own devising. The boy could only be dead.”

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“I know how easy it was,' said Lemoine. Mira didn't follow. How easy what was?' All of it,' he said, shrugging. Getting rich. Staying ich. Winning. It was all so easy. I just took what I wanted, and it was mine. I said what I wanted, and people got it for me. I did what I wanted, and nobody stopped me. So simple. And if it was easy for me, then it could be easy for anybody, and that’s a very frightening thought. Apart from anything else, it would be untenable, Everyone can't be on top, or it wouldn't be the top any more, would it? That's just a fact. And I've been in the citadels of power,' he added. I've eaten at the high tables; I've seen behind the doors that never open. Everyone's the same. You reach a certain level and it's all exactly the same: it's all just luck and loopholes and being in the right place at the right time, and compound growth taking care of the rest. That's why we're all building barricades. It's in case the rest of you ever figure out how incredibly easy it was for us to get to where we are. Jesus,' Mira said. "That's fucking dark”

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