She won the Booker – then got called ungrateful

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Eleanor Catton. The 37-year-old New Zealand novelist and screenwriter is the author of three novels. Her second, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making her the youngest ever winner of that award. Her latest is Birnam Wood.

POLITICS

After you won the Booker, the spotlight was on you as a public figure. Did you feel an extra sense of responsibility to be a spokesperson and role model? I definitely did, and I struggled with it for a long time. I feel as if only now, 10 years later, am I starting to understand the mistakes I made in terms of how I chose to deal with that.

What constitutes a mistake? I felt like I had to be an ambassador for New Zealand. And there’s this expectation that you will only ever talk about the country in the most flattering possible light and you will not air the country’s dirty laundry. But I feel as if that’s the model of an abusive relationship: don’t talk about what happens inside the home.

You were quite viciously attacked for criticising New Zealand’s conservative government at the time. How do you reflect on that? The word that was used at the time, when all of this was going down, was that I was “ungrateful”. Obviously, the assumption behind that word was that my position in the world was something that had been given to me by a culture I was now not allowed to criticise.

It frames your acceptance as conditional. Completely. But I think politics – at its best, in a politically vibrant society – is constantly throwing up new images of itself. And it’s mature enough to be able to handle a lot of different representations of itself, including representations that conflict.

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Your latest novel, Birnam Wood, is about a group of young climate activists. Was the seed of that story a political one? In a way. After being singled out by the prime minister of New Zealand [John Key, who commented, “She has no great particular insight into politics”] and going through this period of public shaming, I reacted very badly. I became very depressed. Out of that depression, I had this niggling fear: maybe my accusers had been right; maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about. That I had used words like “neoliberal” without fully understanding what they meant. So I wanted to go back and do my research. I read political theory. I read economic theory. I read about New Zealand.

Oh, you went deep. A lot of what I had instinctively felt to be true, I was pleased to discover, had a wealth of intellectual tradition behind it.