Eleanor Catton is a much-loved, Booker-winning author. This is Catton’s third novel, but the first I’ve read. The plot, set in New Zealand, concerns a dispute between a guerrilla gardening collective of stereotypical eco-warriors and a stereotypical tech billionaire.

This book has received rave reviews elsewhere, so I think the fault is with me rather than the book, but I just didn’t get it. The writing in the first part of the novel is great, and there is a lot of fun as Catton introduces her well-meaning but essentially ridiculous group of eco-warriors. There’s a particularly memorable scene where the group discusses translating their name—Birnam Wood—into an indigenous language. The group gets into an insane argument over whether that’s a way of showing respect, or whether using someone else’s language is cultural appropriation.

The problem is that the later parts of the book—which are a sort of plot-driven thriller—require me to care about people who have been set up as cartoons. Then the book also ends cartoonishly, sort of reverting to type. I couldn’t make those shifts, and didn’t really care about the characters, losing interest in the slightly silly plot.

Most upsettingly of all, especially for a literary novel, I didn’t feel like I came away from this book with any new perspective on anything. It felt like the novel relied on well-worn tropes without doing anything to subvert them.

So, in summary, this wasn’t for me.