This book has an awful lot going for it—it’s enough to give other books an inferiority complex. For starters, it won the 2013 Man Booker prize, the UK’s top literary prize. Add to that that it’s a beautiful object—a thick, handsome paperback with a beautiful cover and superb design throughout. Reading it on a plane, I was especially pleased to find that it would lay open on my tray without the aid of any additional weight. A flexible spine is a wonderful thing, for people or for books.
Of course, literary prizes and bindings are not intrinsic to The Luminaries as a work of fiction—you could order an electronic copy of the book and never be aware of such things. But even reduced to its chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, you would quickly understand that The Luminaries is a work of rare quality.
You are no doubt wondering if all this indirect praise is heartfelt, or whether I am about to attempt to take this book down a few notches. I want to have it both ways—to give The Luminaries its considerable due, but also to take issue with its somewhat airtight unimpeachable perfection.
The Luminaries is a complicated, original story well told. One of the blurbs on the cover describes it as “a lively parody of a nineteenth-century novel”; another describes it as “a twenty-first century Victorian novel.” And while it’s obvious that The Luminaries shares various characteristics with classic nineteenth century novels—its heft, its large cast of characters, its omniscient narrator and its elegant prose, for example—I never had the sense that it was commenting on or in any way seeking to separate itself from earlier work with which it shared those characteristics. It is most emphatically not a parody.
It’s also obvious from the start that The Luminaries is something more than just a complicated, original story well told—it goes places that Dickens and Eliot never went. This is made clear by the “Character Chart” at the front which presents the 18 major characters in groups such as “Stellar,” “Planetary,” and “Terra Firma” and also gives the first 12 a “Related House” and the other six a “Related Influence.”
I’ve never been much for astrology, so I was hoping my lack of expertise on that subject would not put me at a disadvantage in reading The Luminaries. There are other indications that Catton is holding a few tarot cards up her sleeve. For one thing, the chapters and sections in the book grow progressively shorter. The first section is 360 pages long, the second 160 pages, the third 104 pages, and so on; the last is just two pages. I am not sure how this foreshortening effect connects to the zodiacal theme—if indeed it does. For me, such curious elements are reminiscent of the various mythological and symbolic overlays in James Joyce’s Ulysses and other modernist novels. The Luminaries could stand without them, but even though I didn’t pay very much attention to them, I think they probably heightened my sense of the intricacy and artificiality of the book. This was not a bad thing. I knew to be on my toes and to be willing to regard any and every detail as significant.
Perhaps I should mention what The Luminaries is about? It’s set on the west coast of the southern island of New Zealand, a damp and cool place not unlike the northwest coast of the US. The time frame is 1865-66. This is about 10 or 15 years after English settlers first arrived in New Zealand. There had been an earlier gold rush on the east coast of the island some years before, and now there is a second rush on the west coast where the town of Hokitika has sprung up. This is a real town, by the way, and so I assume that most of the historical setting is also authentic. Twelve men of the town, each corresponding to a sign of the zodiac, make up its civic structure. There is a banker, a chemist (that is, a pharmacist), a chaplain, a shipping agent, and so on. Two of the twelve are Chinese prospectors, and one, Te Rau Tauwhare, is Maori and “a greenstone hunter” who is after a different mineral than the others. These twelve are relatively static—the end of the book finds them much as they were at the beginning. There is a single exception—one of the twelve is killed.
Six other characters move through the book and move through space, for that matter, in a more dynamic manner, and even as I’m typing this, I’m congratulating myself for identifying them as the six "classical" planets known to the zodiac! Score for me! (OK, I see now that the Character Chart does classify these six characters as "Planetary," but I swear I just noticed that.)
The Maguffin of the story is a fortune in gold that changes ownership and form as we read (that is, it’s gold dust at one point, small ingots at another, and stamped bars at a third). Chronologically, the telling of the story starts in the middle (January 1866), runs forward as far as April 1866, then goes to May 1865 before finishing back in January 1866. So we join the action in the middle, see it through to its conclusion, and then circle back to see how it first got set in motion. This is all in proper mystery novel style, and indeed on a certain level The Luminaries is very much a whodunit, except that there is no single “it” that got done. I wasn’t quite sharp enough to figure out every detail—for example, I wasn’t sure who murdered one of the characters until I consulted the internet. But I definitely got most of it, and Catton is quite skillful in spinning us around blindfold at the beginning and gradually giving us just enough information to connect all the dots (to mix metaphors).
All in all, a worthy entertainment, like a well-made summer blockbuster movie. There is a sufficiency of interesting characters and dramatic scenes, and the setting is interesting, though there is very little about the Maori, unfortunately. Were they really marginalized so quickly?
I’m trying to avoid the self-imposed trap here of having to render either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” on The Luminaries. Though it’s a (mostly) realistic novel, it reminds me of The Lord of the Rings in some ways: it’s a clockwork universe with its own logic, limits, and rules. Set in New Zealand, no less. It’s more about the interactions and intersections of the characters than it is about anything going on within their heads. I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies (not all the way through, anyway), but I have read the books. Like The Luminaries, I would recommend them for long flights. To New Zealand, say.
