A triumph of intricate story-telling
In 2011, former MI5 chief, Dame Stella Rimington, stirred a controversy, when as the chair of the Booker Prize jury, she stressed upon readability as one of the driving criteria for their judgement. Another judge clarified that the plot has to zip along. There was a backlash from the literary establishment, championing ‘difficult’ literature. Though the winner (The sense of an ending by Julian Barnes) was a very good book, the shortlist was one of the weakest in years. Two years down the line, with the victory of the longest book at 832 pages, by the youngest author at 28 years, apprehensions of dumbing down should be set to rest. Can good, worthwhile literature, which lays demands on our time and effort, be eminently readable also? The Luminaries proves it definitely can be.
It is intricate and layered, has a huge cast of over fifteen major characters and is bloody entertaining. The plot rips and zips and loops around, we are transported to a vividly recreated place and time and human nature and relationships are explored and elucidated.
The book is divided into 12 chapters, with the first one extending to a mammoth 361 pages and the last one, to less than a page, apparently alluding to the 12 signs of the zodiac and the waning of the moon. There is an omniscient narrator, interjecting at times, into the largely point-of-view, third person narrative, to remind us of the somewhat gimmicky, astrology-based structure. It can be argued whether the astrological references were essential. It could be merely to add an air of mystique to the proceedings, just as one of the characters decides to install an uncomprehending Chinese man as a ‘Living statue of the Orient’ at her farcical séance.
But as a reader, I did not pay much attention to it and it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book. Because, underneath all the mumbo-jumbo, it is about themes at the heart of great story-telling, people venturing to a land of promise to form themselves anew, trying to outrun a past which is always around the corner, about cosmic fate and personal choice.
An outsider arrives in a small, New Zealand goldfields town, in the 1860s, on a stormy night and stumbles upon a gathering of twelve men of disparate backgrounds and social stations, gathered to discuss some mysterious events. All of them are involved and implicated in some manner and each has a small piece of the jigsaw, like the blind men touching an elephant to know what it looks like. So, at one level, the book is a whodunit, inspired by 19th century detective novels, such as those by Wilkie Collins. The resolution of the mystery itself is satisfying but the journey even more so. As the overall picture starts taking shape, scandals and intrigues, secret motivations and agendas tumble out of closets, it feels like a page-turning thriller, rather than an imposing, dense tome.
The setting is reminiscent of the iconic HBO show, Deadwood (Eleanor Catton mentioned the show as an influence in an interview). The frontier town with its cheap, shabby hotels, taverns brothels, opium- dens, the gold-digger camps and the struggle between ‘the savage and the civil’ is brilliantly brought to life. The depiction of the place is realistic and Catton doesn’t pull punches in her lavishly detailed character portraits.
Whenever, a new character appears on stage, she devotes a long paragraph to describing the person’s physical and psychological characteristics. Then, she continues to embellish the characters every time they take a decision or act, gently and lovingly highlighting their virtues and flaws. For instance, a clergyman is a ‘hopeful believer’, speaks of ‘a utopian future, a world without want’, is ‘given to bouts of purposeful ignorance’ and tends to ‘pass over the harsher truths of human nature’ but he is also ‘like all men who will not admit fault to themselves, loath to admit fault to any other man’ and becomes ‘arch and condescending whenever he was accused of doing ill.’
While the outsider, Walter Moody, serves as the brains, assuming the role of the detective, the person at the core of the mystery, the vanished rich prospector, Emery Staines, serves as the heart. When he realizes he has been swindled on his first night in New Zealand, Staines is merely amused. ‘He loved to be enchanted, and so was very often drawn to persons whose manner was suggestive of tragedy, romance or myth’. Though he has read extensively, he favors the Romantics. I felt Moody and Staines represent the two complementary aspects of the book and the author’s construction, the rational and the emotional. As the author busies herself with constructing the elaborate plot, she never loses sight of the human drama.
She also has a wonderfully wry sense of humour. As in a chapter where two Chinese men are being questioned by three white men in a ramshackle tent, a pistol being waved around and misunderstandings being spawned every second across the barriers of prejudice and language (‘the nuances of his character were lost upon the subjects of the British crown, with whom Ah Quee shared but eighty or a hundred words’).
Eleanor Catton’s prose is polished, just a touch mannered (unlike Deadwood, known for its inventive and anachronous swearing, profanity is censored in The Luminaries in accordance with Victorian morals) and a pleasure to read. It is free of unnecessary flourishes, though words like gibbous pop up once in a while. She had already demonstrated her talents with her first book, The rehearsal. Now, in The Luminaries, she lives up to the promise of her debut. She has crafted a delightful novel, which enlightens and entertains.
It is intricate and layered, has a huge cast of over fifteen major characters and is bloody entertaining. The plot rips and zips and loops around, we are transported to a vividly recreated place and time and human nature and relationships are explored and elucidated.
The book is divided into 12 chapters, with the first one extending to a mammoth 361 pages and the last one, to less than a page, apparently alluding to the 12 signs of the zodiac and the waning of the moon. There is an omniscient narrator, interjecting at times, into the largely point-of-view, third person narrative, to remind us of the somewhat gimmicky, astrology-based structure. It can be argued whether the astrological references were essential. It could be merely to add an air of mystique to the proceedings, just as one of the characters decides to install an uncomprehending Chinese man as a ‘Living statue of the Orient’ at her farcical séance.
But as a reader, I did not pay much attention to it and it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book. Because, underneath all the mumbo-jumbo, it is about themes at the heart of great story-telling, people venturing to a land of promise to form themselves anew, trying to outrun a past which is always around the corner, about cosmic fate and personal choice.
An outsider arrives in a small, New Zealand goldfields town, in the 1860s, on a stormy night and stumbles upon a gathering of twelve men of disparate backgrounds and social stations, gathered to discuss some mysterious events. All of them are involved and implicated in some manner and each has a small piece of the jigsaw, like the blind men touching an elephant to know what it looks like. So, at one level, the book is a whodunit, inspired by 19th century detective novels, such as those by Wilkie Collins. The resolution of the mystery itself is satisfying but the journey even more so. As the overall picture starts taking shape, scandals and intrigues, secret motivations and agendas tumble out of closets, it feels like a page-turning thriller, rather than an imposing, dense tome.
The setting is reminiscent of the iconic HBO show, Deadwood (Eleanor Catton mentioned the show as an influence in an interview). The frontier town with its cheap, shabby hotels, taverns brothels, opium- dens, the gold-digger camps and the struggle between ‘the savage and the civil’ is brilliantly brought to life. The depiction of the place is realistic and Catton doesn’t pull punches in her lavishly detailed character portraits.
Whenever, a new character appears on stage, she devotes a long paragraph to describing the person’s physical and psychological characteristics. Then, she continues to embellish the characters every time they take a decision or act, gently and lovingly highlighting their virtues and flaws. For instance, a clergyman is a ‘hopeful believer’, speaks of ‘a utopian future, a world without want’, is ‘given to bouts of purposeful ignorance’ and tends to ‘pass over the harsher truths of human nature’ but he is also ‘like all men who will not admit fault to themselves, loath to admit fault to any other man’ and becomes ‘arch and condescending whenever he was accused of doing ill.’
While the outsider, Walter Moody, serves as the brains, assuming the role of the detective, the person at the core of the mystery, the vanished rich prospector, Emery Staines, serves as the heart. When he realizes he has been swindled on his first night in New Zealand, Staines is merely amused. ‘He loved to be enchanted, and so was very often drawn to persons whose manner was suggestive of tragedy, romance or myth’. Though he has read extensively, he favors the Romantics. I felt Moody and Staines represent the two complementary aspects of the book and the author’s construction, the rational and the emotional. As the author busies herself with constructing the elaborate plot, she never loses sight of the human drama.
She also has a wonderfully wry sense of humour. As in a chapter where two Chinese men are being questioned by three white men in a ramshackle tent, a pistol being waved around and misunderstandings being spawned every second across the barriers of prejudice and language (‘the nuances of his character were lost upon the subjects of the British crown, with whom Ah Quee shared but eighty or a hundred words’).
Eleanor Catton’s prose is polished, just a touch mannered (unlike Deadwood, known for its inventive and anachronous swearing, profanity is censored in The Luminaries in accordance with Victorian morals) and a pleasure to read. It is free of unnecessary flourishes, though words like gibbous pop up once in a while. She had already demonstrated her talents with her first book, The rehearsal. Now, in The Luminaries, she lives up to the promise of her debut. She has crafted a delightful novel, which enlightens and entertains.
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