Book Review: The Luminaries

"A man walks into a bar... “ It’s the beginning of so many bad jokes. And in this case it’s also the beginning action of Eleanor Catton’s 832-page, Booker Prize winning novel, The Luminaries.

It’s the mid 1800s in the Australian gold rush town Hokitika and the “man”, prospective prospector Walter Moody, has stumbled into a very significant bar. Well, the bar itself isn’t significant, but the 12 men meeting there are. The dozen membered assembly is investigating a suspicious series of events that have brought together an unlikely assortment of businessmen, prospectors and a variety of other men including a Maori guide, a Jewish newspaperman and a Chinese opium salesman. They are all somehow involved in the nefarious events surrounding a mysterious 4,000-pound fortune, the attempted suicide of a prostitute, the death of a hermit and the vanishing of the town’s richest man.

In another author’s hands, this exposition could lead to a typical Gold Rush murder mystery, but Catton takes the Victorian narrative structure and expands upon it, creating a web of events and characters so layered and complex that by the end of the story, you still may not know what transpired. In addition to a tricky plot and a large central cast, Catton sets The Luminaries in a Western Astrological-based literary structure that allots a sign or celestial body to every character and opens each chapter with a diagram that (if correctly analyzed) brings to light the events about to occur (pun not intended). You can analyze this book in countless different ways even ignoring the exponentially of the astrological reading. Catton has plenty of subtle metaphors and intricacies to please the English majors among us. The novel’s themes and many narrative arches work in a manner that is similar to the ideas behind astrology itself. The Luminaries capitalizes on a precise and layered plot, but also creates a veil of mysticism and surrealism that truly embodies the duality of the astrological heavens-- both larger than life and making order of everything on earth.

Catton’s supremely crafted setting of Hokitika is a fascinating world removed, both physically and ideologically, from Europe. Her language is both sparingly descriptive and incredibly lush. The book is very wordy and there are a lot of Austen-esque quips and philosophical internal monologues, but Catton’s prose excels in simple, yet haunting, lines that stay with you long after you turn the page. This is a book whose text simply begs to be highlighted or underlined in order to be looked back on later.

This is not to say The Luminaries is a perfect novel. Some things are never fully explained (Moody’s backstory could have been further explored or left out altogether) and the text requires very close reading and the flipping back of pages that some may find arduous (I gave up trying to track the origin of the bonanza that went through about as many hands as the book has pages) and for all of its intricacies some characters never push past one dimension (Carver, for example). The length is a factor and there are multiple points where I felt the story could have concluded (The end of part four, for one). In truth my biggest critique of the novel is that it treads very close to being too tidy, a little too aware of its own brilliance.

Perhaps the book’s merits can be best analyzed using mining terms. The diggers of Hokitika term the yield of most miners’ claims as “a competence”- enough dust to pay for their basic needs of room and board, and The Luminaries provides a competence of narrative and plot- the ingenious structure and clever characters are enough to keep the reader going. However, if you put in the time and mental energy to fully read the text, there are nuggets of wisdom, clarity and beauty that will truly astonish you.