'My father always told me, when it comes to whores and fortune tellers, never give your real name... I like the telling fortunes part. It was rather a thrill, to use another man’s name. It made me feel invisible, somehow. Or doubled—as though I had split myself in two.’ [p. 703]
The setting is Hokitika, a gold-rush town on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, in the 1860s. The novel begins when Walter Moody, recovering from a traumatic and possibly supernatural experience on board the Godspeed, walks into a room at the hotel where he's staying, and discovers a group of twelve men (including a Maori and two Chinese) who eventually begin to tell their stories. They're all there to try to make sense of the death of a recluse, the disappearance of a rich young prospector, and the savage beating of an opium-addicted prostitute. The Luminaries also features forged documents, a threatening chap with a scarred face, a glamorous medium, a surfeit of opium, plus illegitimate children, long-held grudges, secret marriages, and a plethora of more or less likely explanations of the death of Crosbie Wells, the whereabouts of Emery Staines, and the mystery of Anna Wetherell's pistol.
Eleanor Catton's vast Booker-winning homage to the Victorian novel is rigorously structured around an astrological framework: twelve key characters correspond to the twelve houses of the zodiac, and another seven correspond to 'heavenly bodies', while one man, dead by the time the novel opens, stands as 'terra firma', the centre around which everything revolves. Each of the twelve sections is prefixed by an astrological chart showing the positions of the planets in the southern hemisphere in 1866; each chapter within those twelve sections is titled with an astrological description ('Mercury in Sagittarius', for example, which deals with the interaction of the characters corresponding to Mercury and to Sagittarius) and introduced by a brief summary of events within that chapter. As the novel progresses, the chapters get shorter and the summaries get longer. The title, too, is astrological in origin: the eponymous luminaries, astrologically, are the sun and the moon, and the novel deals with (though perhaps does not focus on) the characters to whom the author has ascribed those roles. Catton has said (though I can't now find the source) that she refused to make editorial revisions that did not make sense astrologically.
It's not an easy novel to review, simply because there is so much in it. I suspect I'll come back to it in a few years and find much that I missed this time. But it was a fascinating read, not only for Catton's twisty plotting and the multiplicity of truths, but also for the atmosphere of what's effectively a frontier town, and the odd blend of Victorian morality and new beginnings 'at the southernmost edge of the civilised world'. Catton doesn't obscure or apologise for racism and sexism, and she treats the non-white and non-male characters with the same respect and honesty as she does the white men. And I am very nearly certain that the explanation given near the end of the book for the death, the beating and the disappearance (to say nothing of the missing bullet, the opium poisoning and perhaps the seance) is a convenient invention by one character, rather than any kind of objective truth.
This novel also strongly reminded me of previous visits to New Zealand, particularly to Canvastown (another goldrush settlement): I would love to go back.
For Shop Your Shelves Bingo, Summer 2023: purchased 05 JAN 2014, prompt 'so long'. 832 pages in print!
Fulfils the ‘featuring one of the seven deadly sins’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge: avarice drives much of this novel.
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