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Man Booker winner challenging tale full of intense fun
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“The Luminaries,” Eleanor Catton’s remarkable second novel — the winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize — is a lot of things, and I mean a lot, but above all, perhaps, it is a love story, one that takes all of 826 pages to truly arrive. And it’s not even a novel in the normal sense, but rather a mass confabulation that evaporates in front of us, an astrological divination waning like the moon, the first section 360 pages long (or are those degrees?), the last a mere sliver. But it’s a sliver that delivers.
As Catton’s structural sphere wanes, the growing darkness reveals a starscape that grows and turns and folds in on itself, mystery upon enigma. We meet estranged brothers, meddling clergymen, swindling magnates, investigative journalists, Maori wise men, confidence gamers, Chinese prospectors (speaking in their own language). Finally we fall for lovers separated by fate and the machinations of men, and oh, how we wish them well amid disaster.
It’s a lot of fun, like doing a Charlotte Brontë-themed crossword puzzle while playing chess and Dance Dance Revolution on a Bongo Board. Some readers will delight in the challenge, others may despair. I went both ways.
The setting, circa 1866, is the gold rush town of Hokitika, in the wild southwest of New Zealand, a place where the Maori had long sought greenstone. It’s a type of jade and holy. It took European settlers to notice the unholy gold, great chunks of it. The town is only a few years old, but already there are mansions on the hillsides. And a jail in progress. Ships coming in and out of a treacherous harbor daily, sometimes foundering. Saloons in hotels alongside brothels and banks.
The story opens, with the shaken seaborne arrival of one Walter Moody, a Scotsman trained in law but not yet a barrister, nearly 28 years old (Eleanor Catton’s current age, as it happens), here to make his fortune, running away from bad fortune, too.
A hermit has died in a remote cottage on a muddy claim. A fortune has gone missing. A politician seems to be involved, also a ship’s captain, also a battered prostitute, also a Chinese indentured worker, also a stoical Maori greenstone hunter. Moreover, Emery Staines, a well-liked and much admired young prospector, the richest man in town, has disappeared.
“The Luminaries” is a true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly, the great weight of the book shifting quickly from right hand to left, a world opening and closing in front of us, the human soul revealed in all its conflicted desperation. I mean glory. Surely a book this good could never be too long.
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