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Eleanor Catton on her New Zealand-set Man Booker- longlisted
novel The Luminaries
At one level, Catton’s The Luminaries is an
old-fashioned mystery. It is a pacey and beautifully written tale of love,
lust, greed and murder, following Edinburgh-born Walter Moody trying to
make his fortune during the gold rush on the west coast of New Zealand’s
South Island in 1866. At another level, however, the structure of The
Luminaries is based on astrology. Yes, astrology. But the tome is far
more complex than Mystic Meg’s column. Catton used charts from Sky &
Telescope and a software program called Stellarium to plot the stars
and planets during the course of when the narrative takes place, with
characters linked to the heavenly bodies. There are 12 “stellar” characters
who correspond to the Zodiac signs and seven “planetary” characters, all
grounded by the “earth” character, Crosbie Wells, the murdered man whom the
mystery revolves around.
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