The Luminaries

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, won the Man Booker Prize, but it has polarized many readers. It is a long book, over 800 pages, but as with movies, no good book is too long and no bad book is too short. What The Luminaries is is puzzling.

The book opens with a man named Walter Moody landing on the West Coast of New Zealand in the year 1866. In his hotel he finds a strange gathering of twelve men. Most are white, but there are two Chinese men and one Maori. They tell him a bizarre story that involves the death of one man, the disappearance of another, and the near death of a whore from an overdose of opium.

The town is Hokitika, at the time of a goldmining boom. Gold is one of the overarching themes of the book--who has it, who wants it, who is hiding it. Anna Wetherell, the whore in question, has some sewn into the lining of gowns. The dead man, Crosbie Wells, turns out to have a small fortune left behind, even though he is basically a hermit. But then a lovely Mr.s Wells shows up. And where is Emery Staines, the young co-owner of the Aurora gold mine?

The Illuminaries is told in the style of a Victorian novel, with florid prose and chapters that give summaries before they begin (like a person having a breakdown, the summaries start to get longer than the chapters themselves). It includes a trial, a murder, double-dealing and backstabbing, but somehow I got the impression it was like large jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing.

There is also another level to the book: astrology. In front of each section of the book, Catton gives a star chart. Apparently each one of the twelve men in the beginning of the book have a different astrological sign, and other characters represent planets. For someone who has no belief in astrology, this mean nothing to me.

The prose is occasionally rich and fattening, such as: "That a whore might attempt to take her own life did not strike him as a remarkable thing, nor a very sad one, in this particular case, he might even call a termination merciful. Miss Wetherell lived by the will of the dragon, after all, a drug that played steward to an imbecile king, and she would guard that throne with jealous eyes forever." Or, there are bon mots like this one: "No man likes to called a coward--and least of all, a man who is feeling downright cowardly."

The Luminaries requires a great deal of concentration. It is my habit to read more than one book at a time, so perhaps stretching it out over two months I lost some things. I found the ending unsatisfactory--did someone kill Crosbie Wells or not?--and a tad sentimental. Still, it was an interesting read.