The Luminaries is the kind
of novel that makes people uncomfortable (and not just due to its sheer size!).
It pushes readers, rather than spoon-feeding them. It breaks many of the rules
adhered to by aspiring writers (there are by some counts 19 protagonists—try
selling that one to your creative writing professors). And, above all else, it
plays with our love of logic—the reasoning and deduction that appeals to fans
of mystery and detective fiction—while threatening this with a structure based
on the astrological and a conclusion leaning towards the mystical.
Many of the negative reviews of
the novel which you can find on Goodreads and Amazon (which aren’t nearly as
numerous as those glowing with praise for this Man Booker winner) sound closer
to break up letters. Reviewers tell the book they’re not sure if “it’s you or
me”. They’re worried that they’ve failed a test, that they’re not the readers
they thought they were, that they’ve missed the point.
 |
| Eleanor Catton (1985-) |
But, as with most novels, The Luminaries, while a monumental
achievement, has strengths and weaknesses. Whether you’ll enjoy the novel as
much as I did depends on the value you ascribe to each area:
Setting
Many of us read historical
fiction to be transported to a different place and time and Catton has a
wonderful setting in 1860s Hokitika in New Zealand. There are many tropes of
the nineteenth-century doorstopper here, in a novel more complex than Dickens’s
Bleak House and with multiple
narrators as in Collins’s The Woman in
White, but the unique setting opens up new possibilities for a cast of
gold-diggers, prospectors, politicians, prostitutes, all trying to make it in a
new world, greater diversity, with Maori and Chinese characters as well as British
transplants, and a spectacular natural backdrop to a very human drama.
Plot
Catton is a master of plotting.
I’d give anything to see her outline document! If you love to puzzle out
novels, obsess over the course of events in the podcast Serial, even draw out
your own timelines to keep events straight, this novel might be for you. If
not, it won’t be. This novel doesn’t go easy on the casual reader. Skim one
sentence and you might miss something. Revelations aren’t repeated or greeted
with fanfare.
Pacing and Structure
The structure of The Luminaries is one of its most
distinctive features, with parts decreasing in length as the novel progresses
to mirror the waning of the moon. The characters act and interact in accordance
with the star signs and other astrological bodies they represent, with the star
charts preceding each section bringing another dimension to the reading
experience. This is all very interesting but the victim of this grand design is
the novel’s pacing. The first section is overly long and it takes too much time
for any pieces to fall together. The language and the promise of the magic to
come was what kept me reading but I can understand why some might have lost
their patience. Once the pace picks up so did my reading. It probably took me
half the time to read the final 600 pages, than the first 300.
Character
This was one of the most puzzling
aspects of the novel for me. The astrological framework provides a distinct
basis for each of Catton’s characters and yet they often didn’t feel
differentiated enough. Bizarrely, I got more of a sense of personality when we
weren’t in that character’s point of view, making me wonder if the omniscient
narrative intrusions were keeping us at a distance from those whose heads we
were meant to be in. In Victorian style, characters’ traits are described but I
rarely saw them acted out in a memorable way. If your favourite thing about
fiction is rooting for a hero or heroine you won’t find that here, but it
wasn’t the lack of sympathetic protagonist that bothered me—rather the
characters felt more like pieces on a chessboard than fully realised human
beings.
Language
The Luminaries is
beautifully written. Long as the novel was I found myself rereading stellar
sentences and pausing to marvel at Catton’s turns of phrase. The voice is
simultaneously an homage to nineteenth-century fiction and fresh, bringing
something new to our bookshelves. We often hear the maxim that literary fiction
is character-driven, but The Luminaries
proves the power of plot-driven literary writing.
What would you like to see the
Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by
tweeting @SVictorianist.
A good summing up of the strengths and weaknesses of this book. I read it not long after it came out and what's stayed with me the most was how fascinating I found the setting -- a time and place I knew nothing about. Catton vividly creates 19th-century gold rush New Zealand for us: its beauty and strangeness and peril. I was also very impressed by the plotting, yet I, too, found it hard to get close to the characters or care too much about what happened to them. They did indeed seem like figures on a chessboard.
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