If you know only
two things about The Luminaries by
Auckland writer Eleanor Catton (VUP) most likely they will be that the novel is
short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and that it is vastly long – over 800
pages. This is a book of such heft that I circled it warily for some time,
half-peeved with Catton for presuming to take up so much of my time. And when I
did start to read I got thumb strain from holding the thing open. Was it worth
it? Yes I think so. For what Catton has created is a book that is as
extraordinary as it is lengthy.
Set in rain-scalded
Hokitika during the gold rush of the 1860s, the story opens on a stormy night
as a new arrival, Charles Moody, enters the smoking room of the Crown Hotel.
There he finds 12 men and very soon discovers they are not gathered there by
accident. Each is somehow linked to the events of a night two weeks previously
when a local hermit died, a wealthy prospector disappeared, an opium-addicted
prostitute attempted suicide and a fortune of gold was discovered. All these
pieces of plot are linked in a Rubik’s Cube of a mystery that is precisely
peopled and finely detailed.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd_LSLb8Yx6Elsf12Et3lJP4KLaXy96kBSHJIYKx2GMgUNiBbBIdNWHo846HXxhwPw64IVHMa5PHHuDqyJQE7xFh8Itmsha9V4M_R3laBmYtl88VSYt4zdznaiaO0lZxZ4iyzM/s200/Eleanor+Catton+NZSA+June+12.jpg)
Catton’s control
over her material is awe-inspiring. She marshals her characters and fits
together the pieces of her puzzle with an adroitness that writers with decades
more experience and infinitely more fame might envy. But most of all she brings
to life an era and a place more vividly than pretty much any other piece of
historical fiction I have read – New Zealand or otherwise. She creates a world
and the reader feels a part of it. Rather than all the self-conscious
cleverness and the literary tricks, this is the real shining gold of The Luminaries to me.
The winner of the
Man Booker prize will be announced on October 15. If she gets it then, at 27,
Catton will be the youngest author ever do to so.
Whatever the
result the real triumph is the book itself with its great, big, glorious story
of shipwrecks and swindlers, opium addicts and prospectors, secrets caches of
gold stitched into gowns, fate and fortune, greed, hope and desperation.
It is a challenge
only because there is so much of it. But this is no dry and dull duty read.
Crack it open and The Luminaries will
hook you in and hold you to the very last page.
About the reviewer.
Nicky Pellegrino, an Auckland-based author of popular fiction, is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on Sunday 6 October 2013.Her latest novel , The Food Of Love Cookery School, has just been published.
Footnote:
The Bookman will be at the Man Booker Prize Gala Dinner in London on 15 October and will be reporting on the event on the blog. I have been once before, back in 2007 when Lloyd Jones was short-listed for Mister Pip. It is a very grand literasry event indeed in London's glorious Guildhall. Watch this space.
About the reviewer.
Nicky Pellegrino, an Auckland-based author of popular fiction, is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on Sunday 6 October 2013.Her latest novel , The Food Of Love Cookery School, has just been published.
Footnote:
The Bookman will be at the Man Booker Prize Gala Dinner in London on 15 October and will be reporting on the event on the blog. I have been once before, back in 2007 when Lloyd Jones was short-listed for Mister Pip. It is a very grand literasry event indeed in London's glorious Guildhall. Watch this space.
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