Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton’s new novel is about a group of eco guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand and the trouble they get into with a billionaire tech entrepreneur. In this extract lead character Tony sets out his ideas at a group meeting

Tony was still talking. “As long as you keep treating the individual as the basis of political agency,” he was saying now, “you’re going to be stuck with different forms of capitalism. This is my whole idea. This is what I’m trying to write about. What if we stopped talking in terms of individuals at all, and instead we took the relationship as the base socio-economic unit? The relationships, the bonds, the connections – they’re just as basic to any system as the actual individuals, the actual data. Right?

“And in relationships, we do all sorts of things that radically challenge the neoliberal status quo: we make sacrifices, we put the other person first, we learn to compromise, we care, we help, we listen, we give ourselves away – and fundamentally, those are different kinds of sacrifices to the kind that are all about self-discipline and following a regime. They’re not individualistic; they’re mutual. Like, all the stuff that you were saying before, stopping eating meat, flying less, shopping local, I mean, all power to you, for sure, but there’s something so puritanical about it, like, it’s a programme of asceticism, always being strict and consistent and never being lazy or whatever – and at the end of the day it’s still about you as an individual. Your purity, your moral conscience, the sacrifices you’ve made.”

“But you can’t force people—”

“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.”

The door opened, and he glanced up again, but it was just a smoker returning from a cigarette break.

“But you can’t force people into relationships,” Amber said, taking advantage of the momentary pause. “And even when you’re in a relationship, you’re still an individual.”

Tony was following his own line of thought. “Take the concept of equality,” he said, turning away from Amber slightly to address the rest of the group.”You could argue that it’s only really meaningful on a human scale. In large numbers, all it means is homogeneity, or conformity – huge numbers of people who are exactly the same – I mean, who would want that? It’s oppressive, it’s inhuman, it’s boring. It’s everything everyone says about communism and how deadening it is.

“But between two people, equality is a totally radical idea. I mean, how amazing, that two different people, with different values, and different experiences, and abilities, and needs, that they could see eye to eye, and live in such a way that brings out the best in both of them, right, and allows both of them to flourish! That’s symbiosis, it’s mutuality, it’s love – that’s just the kind of relation to the world that the left should be aiming for. Not where you have to help someone other than yourself, but where you want to. Romantic love, that could be our ideal. Our political ideal.”

From Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. 

Eleanor Catton is our guest at A Drink with the Idler, Thursday 15 June, 6pm.

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