“The Luminaries” by Eleaonor Catton
Holy cats, y’all, I am farther behind on my book blogging than I thought. Better get crackin’.
Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize winning The Luminaries went down in a contentious first match of The Morning News 2014 Tournament of Books to a short indie book, Hill William, by a guy who, on Facebook, seemed to dismiss ToB readers as soccer moms. As a soccer mom, I took offense to this. Soccer moms can be intelligent readers. And in one of those weird things that happens as part of the ToB, I read the match, and the comments, interested in reading The Luminaries and utterly uninterested in reading Hill William.
How to describe an 834-page book in brief? Well, not with the adjective Dickensian, though many reviewers did? It’s sprawling, fascinating, and weird, rotating among a huge cast of characters, each of whom represents one of the twelve zodiac signs or one the planets known at the time of the story, circa 1866. Set during New Zealand’s gold rush, there is a dead man, a mysterious collapsed woman, and a missing man. Who these three are, and how they related and interact with the others, is told in chapters of decreasing length, as in a waning moon. Some of the particulars of the astrology escaped me, but many of the others, as in which character represented which sign or planet, was helpful in cementing the characters in my mind. This is a long, complicated book to get lost in. It reminded me of Bleak House, The Woman in White, Jonathan Strong and Mr. Norrell, and many more. Catton has said in interviews that she was also influenced by the long-form storytelling of current DVD sets. Was the conceit about the astrology helpful, hurtful, or neutral? Readers disagree, though I appreciated this elaboration by one of the Booker judges who picked it.
This is a good book for winter, a good book for a long trip. Probably not a beach read. But if you like to get lost in long, mysterious, Victorian novels, then this one is worth 834 pages of your time.