Author creates innovative Victorian thriller which seeks to peer through doors writers of the period kept firmly shut
Eleanor Catton describes herself as 'very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
It was clear that Eleanor Catton's first novel, published in 2009 and written when she was just 22, heralded the arrival of a spectacular talent. The Rehearsal, a kaleidoscopic narrative about a school scandal among teenagers studying music and drama, jumped about in time and space, shuffling ideas about performance, adolescence and psychology like a pack of cards. It was ambitious, experimental and sometimes downright odd – but seductively, compulsively readable too.
Her second novel, a great doorstopper of a murder mystery set against the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s,, looks at first sight very different; but it carries forward both her epic ambition and commitment to the sensuous pleasures of reading. She does not make things easy for herself: she has organised her 800-page epic according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac, or the sun and moon (the "luminaries" of the title), but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens, while each of the novel's 12 parts decreases in length over the course of the book to mimic the moon waning through its lunar cycle.
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Her second novel, a great doorstopper of a murder mystery set against the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s,, looks at first sight very different; but it carries forward both her epic ambition and commitment to the sensuous pleasures of reading. She does not make things easy for herself: she has organised her 800-page epic according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac, or the sun and moon (the "luminaries" of the title), but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens, while each of the novel's 12 parts decreases in length over the course of the book to mimic the moon waning through its lunar cycle.
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