The bookies’ favourites for this year’s Man Booker were apparently Jim Crace’s Harvest, followed by Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. But Eleanor Catton, of course, pipped them both with her stunning and complex The Luminaries.
This is a Victorian magic box—part baggy mystery, part astrological arcana and literary construct, and partly a game.
The bookies’ favourites for this year’s Man Booker were apparently Jim Crace’s Harvest, followed by Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. But Eleanor Catton, of course, pipped them both with her stunning and complex The Luminaries.
The term ‘luminaries’ in astrology signifies the two most important objects in the skies, the sun and moon. They, along with the patterns of the zodiac, play a key role in this book, and in the interlinked fates of its characters. In the opening pages, in fact, you will find three things: an astrological chart, a character chart of the dramatis personae depicting planetary influences, and a ‘Note To the Reader’ about how exactly the planetary and stellar positions in the book were determined. Most readers would merely glance at these and go straight into the story. That would be a mistake, as you will realise.
The narrative opens on the night of December 27, 1866 (when Mercury is in Sagittarius, we are told). Twelve men are gathered in a run-down hotel in the New Zealand gold-fields, to try and make sense of a set of mysterious events. They are a strange, motley group, including a banker, a legal clerk, a priest, two Chinese businessmen and a Maori gem-hunter. And the matter they’re trying to resolve is that a wealthy gold prospector has disappeared, a derelict has been found dead and, simultaneously, a prostitute has attempted suicide (or was it attempted murder?). As the twelve men struggle to work out the connection between these incidents, a thirteenth man walks in, a complete stranger who, it will turn out, brings with him a clue they would otherwise never have had access to.
The Luminaries is an elaborately structured book, which operates at many levels, like some kind of intricate Victorian magic box. At one level it is a wonderful old-fashioned crime thriller, a cross between Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins, with measures of Charles Dickens, Cheiro and Rashomon stirred into the mix, and which keeps you riveted with each ingenious new twist of the plot. At another level, the book contains a body of arcane astrological research that is carefully correlated with the pre-destinies of the characters, each of whom represents one of the 12 signs of the zodiac. At a third level, it is a brilliantly wrought literary construct, which, apart from its complex astrological schema, is reminiscent of a Fibonacci spiral, whose chapters become progressively shorter and faster, from the opening chapter which runs to a mammoth 360 pages, down to the final chapter, which consists of just a dozen short lines. And, at yet another level, you somehow can’t help but get the feeling that it may all be just a game that the author is playing with you, but you can’t really be sure what, or why. It is the kind of book that one needs to revisit, again and again, in order to discover all of its wonders. I have read it twice so far, and find the urge to read it once again, quite unforced.
Catton, as we’ve been told, is the youngest author to have won the Man Booker Prize, at the age of 28. Her first book, a couple of years ago, was the darkly inventive and highly acclaimed The Rehearsal. We can presumably now look forward to another forty pleasurable years of her writings, as they get mature, more complex and more resonant with time.