Neo-Victorian Voices: Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter, Lizzie Pook (2022)

Welcome back to the Neo-Victorian Voices review series, covering novels set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first. Today I’m blogging for the first time about a book set in 1800s Australia! The closest I’ve gotten previously was 1800s New Zealand, when reviewing Eleanor Catton’s 2013 The Luminaries back in 2018. 

It’s 1896 in Western Australia when Eliza’s father, the owner of a prominent pearling business, goes missing at sea. She and her family arrived from England ten years previously and have suffered more than their fair share of tragedy since. Now, the tomboyish Eliza is on a mission to find and save her father, as she couldn’t the family members she lost before. 

Pook deftly introduces us to the world of a remote (fictional) Australian town, peopled by diverse immigrants, corrupt authorities, and a mistreated aboriginal population. It’s a vibrant setting of inhospitable landscapes, teeming with fascinating, and dangerous, animal life, such as salties, sharks, and kleptomaniac cockatoos. 

If you read historical fiction to be transported to a different time and place and to learn about past events you might not have been aware of, there’s a lot to enjoy about Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter. I relished the insight into the pearl trade and the additional levels of agency possible for a nineteenth-century heroine in an Australian vs. a British, or even an American, setting. Eliza is also an appealing main character, likable without being flawless.

I wish the supporting characters had been a little more developed, especially Axel, Eliza’s will they/won’t they potential love interest, Min, her friend, and the antagonist Parker, who is irredeemably evil. No spoilers here but the revelation of the reason behind the father’s disappearance was also a little underwhelming.

All in, this is an original contribution to the genre and a novel I’d recommend to readers looking to broaden their horizons and follow a nineteenth-century heroine far beyond the drawing room.

What novels should I consider reviewing next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want monthly updates about my blogging/writing? Sign up for my email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (2013)

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.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Transformation, Catherine Chidgey (2005)

Tampa, Florida in 1898. The Tampa Bay Hotel looms over a city that enjoys endless summer, with the occasional hurricane, its minarets gleaming over swamps, orange groves, and displaced Cubans, who save up wages and lottery winnings to help their war-torn homeland.

The Transformation, Catherine Chidgey (2005)

Inside the hotel lives mysterious French wigmaker Lucien Goulet III. Residents and visitors flock to him for memorial jewellery, fashionable fringes, hairpieces to deceive their spouses and repairs to their rocking horses and dolls. And he mocks them all, in his disturbing first person narrative and with the pair of ‘actresses’ who perform for him at night.

Catherine Chidgey pulls off an incredible feat in pulling us into Goulet’s obsession. The novel’s many skeins are united by hair — hair cut off corpses in mausoleums, morgues and graves, hair stolen from lovers as they sleep, hair as the fabric of folktales and myth.

Goulet’s first person sections are interwoven with close third person passages following Rafael, a fifteen-year old cigar maker who enters the perruquier’s employ, and Marion Unger, a lonely widow with rare and entrancing white blonde hair. But it is Goulet who dominates — at once an outsider but also a reflection of this strange world where bodies are very much for sale. Ladies carry alligator handbags and deliver their dead pets to taxidermists, one character plucks out snails to amass a huge collection of their shells, cigars seem more valuable if rolled on Cuban women’s thighs.

Catherine Chidgey (1970- )

The novel’s biggest fault is that, rather than keeping you reading, often Chidgey seems to ask you to pause, to reread paragraphs loaded with such sensual detail they require time to take in. The opening pages, which deal with Marion’s arrival in Tampa and the history of her marriage, are a story in themselves — compelling, tragic, and enthused with the citrus fruits her husband chooses to plant. There’s a richness to the prose and imagery that can be overwhelming. I wanted to savour every line.

Immersed as the reader is in Goulet’s mind, its hard not to wish for a more brutal ending but the conclusion is still a fitting one. There are shades of Pygmalion here, and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, but in a world that’s as alien as it is recognisable.

Do you know any novels set in the nineteenth century and written in the twenty-first that you think the Secret Victorianist should read? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.