Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Booker Prize for her massive novel The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever winner of the prize, all the more remarkable for how much the novel sounds like the creation of a much older mind. It’s part mystery, part historical fiction, a dash of picaresque, and at times a bit of a mess, with one of the most untidy endings I can recall in a novel of this magnitude.
The Luminaries takes us to 1866, to New Zealand’s South Island, and walks us into a gold-rush town called Hokitika with the newly arrived prospector Walter Moody, who is there to pan for gold, and instead wanders headlong into a series of interconnected mysteries in the town involving a corrupt sea captain, a missing goldpanner, a dead hermit, an opium-addicted prostitute, a possibly-bogus will, a vendetta, Sinophobia, a M?ori miner, and more. The twelve men he meets are all caught up in the web of mysteries in some way, with their connections forming an elaborate tapestry that puts Moody (and the reader) well into the weeds before any resolution appears. The mysteries are gripping, but they’re far better because of the strength of all of the characters Catton has created; if anything, Moody is this novel’s Nick Jenkins, the observer character who is himself not all that interesting.
The central mystery revolves around that dead hermit, Crosbie Wells, and his unknown relationship to the conniving captain Francis Carver, and their shared connection to Anna Wetherell, the prostitute who was found unconscious, possibly as a result of a failed suicide attempt, on the side of a road the same night that Wells was found dead in his hovel. That question drives the plot, but the way Catton unfurls it, character by character, shows incredible plotting for such a young novelist, and allows her to give the reader a cornucopia of fascinating and often weird characters, most sympathetic, a few decidedly not so. You come for the mystery, but you stay for the weirdos.
Catton did make two significant structural choices in the novel that didn’t quite work for me. She used the signs of the western zodiac and other astrology tidbits to title the chapters, and the twelve men are supposed to correspond to those signs. Astrology is woo, and if there’s a real connection between the zodiac signs and anything in the book, I missed it, and I’m not terribly sorry about it. She also concludes the novel’s main narrative somewhat abruptly, and then jumps back in time to provide a mostly linear narrative of what actually happened before Moody arrived, an answer key of sorts at the back of the book. Doing so is not an inherently bad choice – every mystery needs its solution – but the switch was sudden, and after the climax of the main story, which has an unexpected event that triggers the end, we get very little resolution or explanation of what happened or how the main characters react to it.
I’ve read plenty of 800+ page novels, but few are actual page-turners. The Luminaries flew by, with prose that evokes the 19th century without sounding like it was written in the 19th century – there’s some formality, some nods to colloquial English of the time, but the majority of the prose reads like it was written more recently. That central narrative gripped me from fairly early on in the story, and Catton increases its complexity (and thus the reader’s confusion) quite well before the gradual revelations of different characters’ parts in the overall drama. The Booker Prize winners’ list is a real mixed bag, but this is one of the better ones I’ve read – and one of the most readable, too.
Next up: I’m partway through this year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise, by Damon Galgut.