The Luminaries (2013)
Who wrote it?
Eleanor Catton (1985- ; active 2008- ), born London, Ontario, Canada but brought up largely in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her family had no TV and her mother was a librarian, which contributed to her being both an avid reader and writer from an early age. She studied English at the University of Canterbury and took a Master's in Creative Writing at the The Institute of Modern Letters at the Victoria University of Wellington.
Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, was written as her Master's thesis and published in 2008 when she was aged just 22. It won the 2009 Betty Trask (first novel) Award in the UK, as well as being nominated for the Orange (Women's) Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. She was awarded a fellowship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she began work on her second novel, The Luminaries, which (as we know) won the Booker Prize.
She screenwrote and co-showran the 2020 BBC adaptation of The Luminaries, as well as screenwriting the 2020 film version of Austen's Emma. Outside of her work, she has often been an outspoken commentator on political and environmental issues, including a very public war of words with former New Zealand PM John Key in 2015. She currently lives in Cambridge, England with her husband, poet Steven Toussaint.
What's it about?
The Luminaries takes us to New Zealand, during the Gold Rush years in the mid Nineteenth Century. In straightforward plot terms, it’s a mystery novel centering on the aftermath of a series of seemingly disconnected events in the town of Hokitika. Central is the death of a little-known hermit, Crosbie Wells, alongside the disappearance of a rich young prospector, Emery Staines, and the arrest of opiate-addicted prostitute Anna Wetherell. The novel begins with the arrival of outsider Walter Moody, who stumbles upon a meeting of 12 men to discuss the mysterious events. Beyond this basic premise, though, the novel is a complex and rigidly-structured exercise based around the Western system of Astrology, with each of the men representing a zodiac sign, and far more complexity layered on top of that.
The first, and longest, of the 12 sections of the novel (which gradually decrease in length - in line with the phases of the moon) introduces us to each of the 12 men, filtered through the lens of Moody, who begins as the central narrator. We are introduced to other central characters, most notably the politician Alastair Lauderback, the roguish ship’s Captain Francis Carver, and the widow of the deceased hermit, Lydia Wells. It’s revealed that Crosbie Wells died with a mysterious fortune in his house, and much of the plot subsequently focuses on establishing how this came to be.
The central sections of the novel resolve most of its issues, along the way featuring a seance, the deaths of several key characters, and the gripping trial of two others. As the chapters shorten, and the pace increases, we discover a love story hiding behind the layers of mystery and complexity.
It’s a very difficult novel to summarise, shall we say?
What I liked
You cannot help but be amazed and astonished by the extent of the work that has gone into this 800+ page epic. It’s a novel of many layers, able to be read and enjoyed (usually) on multiple levels, and with an elaborate structure that must have taken an incredible amount of work and effort to construct.
What’s more impressive is that, at least once the difficult first section has been cleared, it manages all of this while pulling you along with an engaging and page-turning mystery novel, taking all the tropes of the Victorian sensation novel and dialling them up to 11.
I do have many issues with the structuring, however impressive it may be formally, but one thing I liked was the fact that it was laid out openly. It may recall elaborately structured modernist exercises from Joyce et al, but in exposing its internal mechanisms it does at least add a nice postmodern touch (more on this below)
It’s occasionally shocking, occasionally laugh out loud funny, and becomes surprising pacy for at least its second half.
The world-building is brilliant, taking you right to the heart of the Gold Rush and bringing the locations to life with real clarity.
Similarly the language and style feels like a note-perfect recreation of the Victorian fiction it pastiches. All very impressive stuff.
It stays with you and feels hard to replace - there is a sense of sadness at having to depart such a rich world.
What I didn’t like
I was extraordinarily conflicted by this one, in so many ways. I was ultimately won over to it, for all the reasons above, but oh man this was a tough journey.
First up, it’s super long. I like a long read. What I love most in long reads, though, is usually a grand historical sweep. Decades covered, multiple lives explored, history unfolding across chapters. This one, chronologically, has a very narrow focus. It felt like its length was more in service of its structure than its plot or characters, right down to the first, seemingly-neverending section having 360 pages (BECAUSE CIRCULAR DO YOU SEE?)
Speaking of that section… on first reading, it dragged so much. Repetitive introductions to a bunch of hard to distinguish (in many cases) men who you really struggle to care about. Little light being shed on the characters who turn out to be central protagonists. Too much sense that this is all a structural game, too little reward. One of the few times in this whole project I’ve been tempted to give up - thank you to those of you over on Bookstagram who encouraged me to persevere!
Overall the characters continued to be pretty hard to care about. There are exceptions: it’s hard not to see why the BBC adaptation ended up focusing on the female characters, who stand out a mile, and to a lesser extent Emery Staines, whose wide-eyed optimism brightens the page no end when he finally shows up. Sook’s story is good, Te Rau Tawhare is intriguing if underused. Beyond that, a bit meh in general.
Telling and not showing. The points at which I really wanted to throw this book on the floor were the horoscope-like introductions to the 12 characters. Before we are given any reason to care about any of them, we are uniformly given a lengthy and generally tediously generalised Myers-Briggs profile of each of them, which they then (of course) proceed to live up to precisely, rather than in any way subverting. I get that it’s all part of the deliberate artifice, but it really does run counter to every principle of decent character development.
Back to that structure. A++ for effort, yes. The occasional wry smile at the postmodern cheek of it all, for sure. But otherwise….. why? Did anyone who enjoyed this book find that the structure actually added to the enjoyment of reading? I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it was a barrier to enjoyment, but I don’t know if it in any way enhanced it? It’s all very, very writerly, and fair play to Eleanor if she had fun with it, but this sort of thing doesn’t feel designed for the reader. Lucky, then, that the story behind it is so much fun and ultimately none of it really matters.
It’s a very difficult novel to put into neat lists of likes & dislikes, shall we say?
Food & drink pairings
Laudanum
Copious amounts of hard liquor
Fun facts
This is, to date, drumroll…. the longest novel to win the Booker! Really??? I hadn’t noticed.
This is perhaps a timely point to remember that Booker judges, on top of the hundreds of books they have to get through to whittle down to longlist and then shortlist, end up having to read the winner three times. Round of applause for the Booker judges, please!
Eleanor Catton is the youngest winner of the Booker, at 28, and was at the time the youngest to be shortlisted, at 27.
She’s also only the second winner of New Zealand citizenship, following Keri Hulme who won for The Bone People in 1985… the year of Catton’s birth.
The Luminaries was adapted into a 6-part BBC miniseries which aired in 2020. It was adapted by Catton herself and initially rejected before a dramatic revision which made it firmly focused on Anna’s story and largely jettisoned the 12 men and their horoscopes (something which some would argue would have improved the book..). It starred Eve Hewson as Anna, Himesh Patel as Emery, and Eva Green as Lydia.
2013 was the end of an era for the Booker. Up to 2013, eligible books had to be written by authors of British, Commonwealth or Irish heritage. The rules for 2014 were expanded to include any book written in English. Many at the time focused on a key implication of this change: the Americans were coming. There was a lot of fear that US authors would come to dominate the Prize, which probably hasn’t quite transpired to the levels feared - only 2 of the 9 winners (over 8 years) are Americans who wouldn’t previously have been eligible (Douglas Stuart I assume would, due to Scottish birth and dual citizenship.)
Perhaps more valid were concerns that lesser-celebrated voices from outside the US would struggle to find their way onto shortlists in future, particularly in light of the fact that numerous prestigious US-centric Prizes already existed. Some, like Philip Hensher, were simply “baffled”:
"It seems quite baffling to many writers that a major prize that has so successfully promoted them should move its terms so radically and for no good reason."
Booker custodians argued the contrary - that change was overdue and that existing rules were like having “Border Control” involved in selection.
In reality, this is an argument that could go on indefinitely. If the border barriers can come down, then why not the language barriers?
In any case, the debate over this seems to have settled down now - the Booker seems to get just as much attention as ever, and subsequent winners seem to have maintained the general spirit and feel of the Prize, so we won’t be going on about this every year…
Vanquished Foes
NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names)
Jim Crace (Harvest)
Jhumpa Lahiri (The Lowland)
Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being)
Colm Tóibín (The Testament of Mary)
The final list under the “traditional” Booker rules - more on this below. Any tips from the shortlist?
The Women's Prize for Fiction (officially renamed in 2013) went to A.M. Homes for May We Be Forgiven, which I remember very much enjoying. She triumphed over a strong shortlist which included 2012 Booker winner Bring Up The Bodies, Zadie Smith's excellent NW and Kate Atkinson's Life after Life.
Context
In 2013:
Meteor explosion over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk injures over 1000
Park Geun-hye becomes the first woman to become the president of South Korea
Benedict XVI resigns as pope, becoming the first to do so since Gregory XII in 1415
EU bailout of Cyprus
Boston Marathon bombings
Murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by Islamist terrorists in London
Croatia joins the EU
1,429 are killed in the Ghouta chemical attack during the Syrian Civil War
Nairobi Westgate shopping mall terrorist attacks in Kenya
United States v. Windsor grants federal recognition to same-sex marriage in the United States.
Death of former British PM Margaret Thatcher
Publication of draft EU (Referendum) Bill by UK Conservative party
Andy Murray becomes first British man to win Wimbledon since the 1930s
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
12 Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street
Gravity
Frozen
Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
David Bowie, The Next Day
Kanye West, Yeezus
Beyoncé, Beyoncé
Life Lessons
Horoscopes are very meaningful and dictate everything that you ever think or do. Right??
Love conquers all. Um, to the point at which we perhaps wonder why we even bothered with the preceding 800 pages?
Score
8
Such a tough one to score. Some aspects of it were so irritating that I wanted to throw the bloody thing at the wall, but all that structural, astrological infrastructure couldn’t diminish what was ultimately (if only “eventually”) a really very enjoyable book.
Yet another one to prove the point that books that start badly are worth sticking with, but I do have to massively applaud anyone who made it through those first 360 pages without a good reason to do so. I certainly wouldn’t have.
Ranking to date:
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - 9.5
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981) - 9.5
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee (1999) - 9.5
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (2004) - 9
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga (2008) - 9
Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth (1992) - 9
Oscar & Lucinda - Peter Carey (1988) - 9
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978) - 9
Life & Times of Michael K. - J. M. Coetzee (1983) - 9
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (1997) - 9
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982) - 9
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai (2006) - 9
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (2002) - 8.5
Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel (2012) - 8.5
The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1985) - 8.5
How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman (1994) - 8.5
Troubles - J.G. Farrell (1970, "Lost Booker") - 8.5
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes (2011) - 8
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (2000) - 8
Possession - A. S. Byatt (1990) - 8
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel (2009) - 8
Saville - David Storey (1976) - 8
The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton (2013) - 8
The Sea - John Banville (2005) - 8
The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell (1973) - 8
Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre (2003) - 7.5
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (1992) - 7.5
The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson (2010) - 7.5
Rites of Passage - William Golding (1980) - 7.5
The Gathering - Anne Enright (2007) - 7.5
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey (2001) - 7.5
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) - 7.5
Last Orders - Graham Swift (1996) - 7
The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens (1970) - 7
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (1974) - 7
Holiday - Stanley Middleton (1974) - 7
Heat & Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) - 6.5
In a Free State* - V.S. Naipaul (1971) - 6.5
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle (1993) - 6
G. - John Berger (1972) - 6
The Famished Road - Ben Okri (1991) - 6
Something to Answer For - P. H. Newby (1969) - 5.5
The Ghost Road** - Pat Barker (1995) - 5.5
Staying On - Paul Scott (1977) - 5
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan (1998) - 5
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (1984) - 4.5
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986) - 4
*Read in later condensed edition.
**Third part of a trilogy of which I hadn’t read pts 1&2
Next up
A new era of Booker history begins with Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
