The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. It is full of narrative, linguistic and psychological pleasures, and has a fiendishly clever and original structuring device. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement and will confirm for critics and readers that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.

• ISBN10: 1847084311
• ISBN13: 9781847084316
• Publish Date: 1 August 2013 (first published 1 January 2013)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 7 July 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Granta Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 848
• Language: English

Reviews

[jnkay01]

After reading a review suggesting that this book needs to be read twice at least to be fully appreciated, I decided to stop torturing myself with it and I bailed at 60% finished. Life is too short to stick with a book this boring even once.

[gmcgregor]

Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries is many things. It's a depiction of life in a gold-rush-era town in New Zealand. It's a story about families. It's a mystery. It's several mysteries, each unspooling at its own pace. And true to its title, it takes inspiration from the moon (each chapter is shorter than the one proceeding it, meant as a reference to the waning of the moon) and the planets/stars (some characters are based on astrological signs, others to the typical traits associated with the planets). It begins when a Scottish lawyer named Walter Moody arrives in the small town of Hokitika to make his fortune as a prospector. The ship on which he arrived, the Godspeed, was wrecked and he has to make his way ashore without his trunk. He decides to spend his time in the Crown Hotel while he waits for the wreck to be plunged and his belongings to be recovered, and shortly after he arrives, he manages to find himself in the bar of the hotel with twelve men who are clearly all gathered for a purpose. He manages to draw out from them a strange tale of several tragedies and mysteries that all seem to have happened at about the same time.

Shortly before Moody's arrival, a local politician, Alistair Lauderback, arrives in town to stump for votes. On the outskirts of town, he arrives at the cabin of a recluse, Crosbie Wells, and finds the man very recently deceased. And then, on the same night, a lucky young prospector, Emery Staines, goes missing, and a prostitute, Anna Wetherell, publicly overdoses on the opium to which she is addicted and is imprisoned. Each of the men in the bar of the Crown Hotel has a little piece of the story, and even more develops as time goes on. Bit by bit, the full story in all its beauty and tragedy is revealed, connecting the threads of each seemingly-separate piece together.

This is a big, ambitious novel that requires a lot of attention to keep the characters and their relationships with each other in mental order. In lesser hands, it would be confusing, but Catton keeps it engaging, requiring enough consideration to feel compelled to really focus on the book without making it feel like studying. The characters are complex and interesting, and the tangled web of their interactions with each other keep the tension from slacking. Indeed, for such a long book, it keeps itself going remarkably well, a testament to Catton's skill with prose and plotting. The way the layers of the mysteries the book presents are gradually peeled back and revealed is gratifying, feeling like tiny rewards doled out along the way until the end. The themes of loneliness, the role of chance, truth and lies, and revenge all come in and out of focus throughout, each feeling like it's given time and space to develop without being unduly flogged. For me, it was a wonderful book. It's hard to strike the balance between "passively entertaining" and "too much information management required to properly enjoy", but The Luminaries was right in the sweet spot. I got lost in it.

Now that I've just gushed about it, it does have some issues. It's a slow starter, taking advantage of its prodigious length to stretch the story out perhaps more than really necessary. Some characters feel like they get the short shrift and if Catton was less wedded to her astrology conceit, should have been cut. The way Catton reveals a bunch of pertinent information right at the end of the book in flashback, almost like a coda after the "real" ending of the story, does feel a little too cute by half. But honestly, those are mostly nitpicks. I'm not the sort to wish that a book would never end (I'm always excited about something on the horizon), but I did close it with a satisfied sigh and think "what a great book". It's not something to read when you're looking for something breezy and light, but otherwise, I highly highly recommend it.

[maggiefan]

I did not like this book, though it had potential, and it's sad.

[celinenyx]

The Luminaries is a technical achievement. The chapters wax and wane, the characters revolve around each other like the stars, their paths intersecting in complex patterns. Written in a style heavily inspired by Victorian novelists, The Luminaries presents the tale of twelve men brought together by circumstance.

Although I love the idea, and the execution is handled well, I never truly latched onto The Luminaries. I started reading it in December 2016, and read it on and off, only to finish it in March 2018. On one hand it is a testament to the novel that I kept coming back, but on the other it is very telling that I kept prioritizing other books as well. It is more a book that I admire from a distance, than one I devour.

Set during the gold rush in New-Zealand, The Luminaries starts with Walter Moody arriving in Hokitika, a small mining outpost in the New-Zealand wilderniss, having seen a ghost. The story involves several fortunes gained and lost, secrets that can't be contained, and a missing person considered dead. The cast of main characters is large, though Ms Catton draws them with Dickensian eccentricity which helps keeping them apart.

I feel like a broken record here, but I was disappointed by the centrality of men in The Luminaries. The three named women in the book barely figure - and in a 800-page novel I feel there is no excuse for this. Both Anna Wetherell and Mrs Sheppard are wet mops of women, simply being buffered around by the men in their lives, showing nothing but the slightest moments of agency. Nor are they given much interiority, with makes matters worse. Lydia Wells is an unsympathetic figure yet interesting, but is equally kept from the narrative. Though the women, in particular Anna and Lydia, are essential for the plot, it is the men that tell and move this story. The women take the traditional passive role - and this frustrates me. Even true 19th-century literature gives women more agency and voice than this, no matter how unequally treated they were. It's the 21st century. We can do better than this.

---
Trigger warnings: drug addition, emotional and physical abuse, racism, questionable consent, miscarriage.

[clementine]

I absolutely loved this and I can't think of a single thing I'd change about it. I seem to have a thing for polarizing, long novels - though I will say that I found this one much faster-paced than, say, anything by Donna Tartt. It never dragged at all for me. I loved the Victorian pastiche, I loved the clever structure (with each chapter being approximately half as long as the one preceding it, thus inducing a sort of urgency until it all comes to a head), I loved the characters. Oh, and I adored the conspicuous, self-referential narrative voice. All in all it's a great yarn written expertly and structured cleverly. I know some reviews have panned the structure as being gimmicky and intellectual rather than artistically-pleasing, but I do get a thrill from some of the structural tricks Catton pulled whether or not they were of narrative importance. All in all, I loved this book - it's whimsical, a bit fantastical, and completely enjoyable. I got sucked in and enjoyed every minute of it.

[clq]

It's hard to overstate how technically impressive The Luminaries is. It's over 800 pages of a complicated, intentionally disjointed, ambitious story which is told in a consistent old-English style that adds more to the atmosphere of the whole thing than one would think. It all becomes even more impressive when one considers that the author was only 28 years old when she wrote this. By pretty much any standards it would be impossible not to consider The Luminaries an awesome (in the proper sense of the word) piece of work.
Unfortunately I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I should have done.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that this book is rather harsh on the reader. From page one the reader has to sit through many, many, many, pages of strangers speaking about things of little apparent consequence that happened to other strangers. Of course, it all becomes relevant at some point, but still. I normally appreciate being kept in the dark for the sake of a subsequent big reveal, but there is a limit to how many hours I can enjoy reading what is mostly background to a story that will take place some hundred pages later. For me that limit was reached. I'm not unreasonable though. Had I felt that the rest of the story justified the time it took to get there, I might be inclined to forgive it. I didn't feel like it did. That's not to say the story isn't great. It meshes together an extremely wide range of themes into a story that eventually becomes interesting, very original, and, towards the end, rather thrilling. It just doesn't become quite interesting or thrilling enough to justify what I felt was the long path I took to get there.

Also, I haven't written anything about the content of the book. I'm always very careful to avoid spoilers, and in this case I'm honestly not sure what would constitute spoilers and what wouldn't. On the one hand I could give a three sentence summary of the basic premise. On the other hand I feel that said summary would pretty much cover the first third of the book.

That is not to say I didn't like the book. Once I got to the meat of it, and it was revealed to me what was actually going on, I did manage to get into it. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if more was revealed a little sooner, or maybe that would ruin the point and the effect of the story entirely. I really don't know. I just feel that the book really didn't work for me. On the other hand, considering this is an 800+ page book that really didn't work for me, the fact that I still quite liked it must count for something.

So I really am torn when it comes to this book. I think the only kind of person I would recommend this to is the kind of person who will probably already have read it. Want a mightily impressive work of art that will challenge you? Go for it. Want a book you can enjoy without pouring what feels like several 10K runs worth of physical effort into reading it? Choose something else.

[mary]

“There was this large world of rolling time and shifting spaces, and that small, stilled world of horror and unease; they fit inside each other, a sphere within a sphere”.


The novel is set in Hokitika, a gold-mining town in New Zealand at the height of the West Coast gold rush in 1866. This much is factual but the story and characters are fictional. The novel is written in the style of a historical Victorian novel, it is part thriller, mystery, detective novel, love story, drama and the eclectic mix of characters each have their own individual story to tell. Some of them experience great wealth and good fortune whilst others are exposed to the raw side of life through disgrace, downfall or tragedy. It is definitely a novel you can lose yourself in. As you can tell, it’s a complex novel but incredibly well-written and perhaps one of the cleverest layouts of a novel I’ve ever come across.

The Luminaries is a lot of things, but at the centre of all of them it is a murder mystery. In 1866 an old hermit has been found dead in his home and a wealthy young man has gone missing. In Part 1, Walter Moody arrives in the gold mining town of Hokitika in New Zealand ready to make his fortune. What he finds instead is a meeting of twelve men who each have overlapping connections to the mystery.

The murder mystery is the catalyst for all subplots, which have something to say about friendship, love, betrayal and the culture of several different nationalities. Go read it for yourself.