The Luminaries

I loved this book. A gold-rush-era New Zealand epic, but with a voice that reminded me of George Eliot.

No wonder she won the Booker. How did she organise such complexity so well?

   Since really getting back into reading a few years ago my general reading style has stayed the same.  I can read pretty fast and I actively enjoy the process of doing so.  That's not to say that I skim, but I'm not the type of person to linger over a page or a sentence that really strikes me.  I just take a note of it and move on.  The Luminaries is the first book that I've read not only this year but this decade that has made me change that.  I read this book a lot slower than I normally do because each page and sentence is worth savoring.  For a book that's over 800 pages, that is a serious feat.    I'm not quite sure how to describe The Luminaries so this paragraph may be a bit unstructured.  It definitely has mysteries but it can't really be classified as a mystery novel.  It takes place in the past but it's not really historical fiction.  It has thrilling sections but I can't in good conscious call it a thriller.  It's just... a damn good novel.  The basic gist of it is that 12 people convene in a smoking room in a hotel during the New Zealand gold rush due to a few odd events that have happened over the past few weeks.  Over the course of the novel we learn a lot about each of these 12 as well as many others in this small mining town.  Catton explores her characters in such lush detail that I feel like I know all of them personally at this point.  As we learn more about the characters we also learn just what happened in order to set off the events of the novel.  It feels like Catton is really challenging her readers with the way she writes at points.  While many of the loose threads are explicitly tied up at various points throughout the novel, many others are finished in a more subtle way, rewarding those attentive enough to notice the tiniest of details in her writing.  One of my favorite things about reading is the feeling you get when you realize someone is truly amazing at the act of writing, and I felt that many times while reading The Luminaries.  She really makes writing seem like a beautiful art form with the way she crafts this book and the sentences within it.  I can't help but... be in awe of her talent.  If there is one criticism I have it's that I feel like the book starts out stronger than it finishes, but that is the tiniest of nits that I am picking.  I think the first 500 or so pages are a 10 out of 10 and the remaining 300 are a 9 out of 10.  Well done Eleanor Catton, your book is super fucking good.  

I had to wait about 12 hours before writing this review. It's the kind of book that calls for contemplation and reflection once completed. The premise is so intriguing: A hermit is dead; a whore is found drugged and wandering the streets, and the town's richest man has disappeared. Twelve relative strangers from different cultures and walks of life meet in secret to discuss the events surrounding the mystery. And Walter Moody stumbles in on it ...

Catton delivers a masterfully written frontier mystery as intricate and magical as the stars governing the characters' lives. I can't pretend to understand the connection to the charts and stellar bodies she includes, but it was a lot of fun just going with it anyway.

This is an incredibly dense and complex novel, with a vast and rich cast of characters. It will not be for everyone, and it is not an easy read. It is however, a literary feat and completely deserving of the Man Booker prize.

Really wonderful. A journey from complete mystification to gradual enlightenment. A community on the edge of civilization. A touch of the supernatural. A love story and a story of people remaking themselves. I did not want to put this book down.

I feel slightly churlish giving such an incredibly intricate and well written book so few stars, but unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy it all that much. There were too many characters introduced so slowly and in such detail I had forgotten who many of them were by the time they reappeared, and I spent a lot of time hoping for some kind of recap so I could once again get back on track with what was going on.

Having started this while in New Zealand, it was fun trying to imagine the modern town of Hokitika reduced to such squalor and frenetic activity, like the antipodean version of the wild west. Catton certainly has a brilliant command of psychology and behaviour, imbuing all of her characters with unique and complex motivations. But the only one I really cared about was Staines, and the love story with him and Anna is certainly the highlight of the book.

There are many good reviews elsewhere on Goodreads which elaborate on all the clever structural and astrological tricks that are employed throughout the novel, but most of them went over my head. It's not a great mystery, it's certainly not a page turner, and it's at least 300 pages too long. But I was still mightily impressed by it, while remaining mostly bored.

It was with anticipation that I sat down to read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. I did so not long after it was announced that the young author had won the Man Booker Prize in 2013. I was excited to be reading a novel so acclaimed, yet written by a young woman, of similar age and similar antipodean extraction to myself. As an astrology enthusiast, I was also curious to see how Catton had executed a plot structured according to astrological sensibilities.

Although the book is dense - definitely a ‘doorstopper' in the traditional sense- I found the narrative engrossing and compelling. In brief, The Luminaries is a murder-mystery set in nineteenth century New Zealand. For the most part, events take place in a weatherbeaten and isolated town built upon the gold rush and its surrounding coastal region. Everyone is looking to make something of the boom, though all in their own ways.

Catton's cast of characters are positioned to represent both the planets and the twelve zodiac signs, and their personalities designed to manifest their respective astrological traits. Not only the characters in Catton's novel, but all the story's events are written to correspond to the stars' position in the heavens. In this way, one chapter may manifest the square of Uranus in Capricorn and Venus in Pisces, for example. And there is another layer, that is evident to the reader as they progress, which is that the length of the chapters themselves are measured to correspond to the waxing and waning of the lunar cycle.

There is no denying the structural genius and penetrative research that Catton demonstrates in this work. Though with all the focus on timing and astrology, I felt that perhaps an element of the human was lost in the emphasis on the engines of fate, so to speak. At times I felt it difficult to connect to characters, not least because Catton's chosen style, though executed with great grace, necessitated shifting the narrative from one character's experience to another's. In terms of astrology too, the characters were restricted to wholly manifesting almost one sign or planet exclusively, rather than a more realist portrayal of nuanced influences that modern astrology generally takes. There was a dryness to the story, I felt, and a magic left out of it, for all the calculation. I was never transported, or truly moved. This is not to say I don't admire Catton's breaking of new ground. Reading it was quite a rigorous exercise - in all senses, but one which I nevertheless was happy to partake in, though it fell short of my high expectations.

Really glad I opted for the audiobook version as well! The narrator does an excellent job with all the characters!

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

Quite a thick book, full of marvellously crafted characters bound together by a compelling mystery storyline. I wonder though, if it would have been a bit of a drag to keep track of all the plot if I wouldn't have had the luxury and time to devour it all in 4 days on the beach.

Definitely left me aching for a Deadwood rewatch.

This bloated, plodding, overstuffed-yet-thinly characterized Dickensian wannabe lacking any venture or stakes or archetypal theme mounted on a clever yet conclusively gimmicky astrological/lunar cycle structure actually won the Booker Prize in 2013.

Good lord.

I read this because it beat A Tale for the Time Being for the Man Booker in 2013 and so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. This is a long (800+) but relatively quick-moving read about a gold-mining community in New Zealand in the 1800s. Like a mystery, characters are slowly introduced and exposed, and a blurry image of what's going on clarifies throughout. Overall, I liked this but would have shelved it early on if it wasn't a book club assignment. I felt there are better things to read and the opportunity cost of reading something so long wasn't worth it for me.

most of the astrological stuff went right over my head but it's a bloody good story

I listened and read this book together, and the narrator, Mark Meadows, was fantastic. As for the writing, the Victorian style is intricate and immersive in a world I certainly knew nothing about, but the story was overly complicated and its mystery, once solved, not vert satisfying for 834 pages.

Good story but given setting and size of book missed deeper digging into imperialism & ecological change

I didn't love this novel. I liked it well enough and can see why it got the attention of the Man Booker committee: it's ambitious, it's novel, it is put together in a very conscious, artistic way. But the stellar architecture struck me as unnecessary. I am not sure the constraints dictated by Catton's chosen structure enhanced the book, either in purely artistic terms or in terms of my reading pleasure. And the speed of the ending, the way the chapters veritably run up into one another, after such a very very slow opening to the novel, leaves the reader feeling. . . . a bit adrift.
As far as a sense for the NZ goldrush, though, and the era and place–that was truly remarkable.

For me this didn't live up to my expectations. I guess I should stop being allured by Man-Booker prize winners, they run so hot and cold. I can't fault the appeal of this book - a Kiwi author, set in a fascinating time period - the 1860s gold rush of the Otago goldfields (in the south of New Zealand), and on the West Coast of the South Island. It is a spectacular setting.

It is hard to put together a critique of this book without touching on some events and characters in this book, so to be fair to those who intend to read it, I have slapped most of this review into a spoiler. It is too hard to tiptoe around the story...

There are a number of things that annoyed me with this book, and surprisingly, the 830 page length is not one of them. I have no issue with a long book, if the story is worth the pages. However in a book this long, in a setting this good, I have an expectation of some excellent descriptive writing. I want atmosphere, I want to understand the setting from the writing (and not just from prior knowledge), I want the writing to evoke the setting. Unfortunately, this book offered practically nothing on this front. It was so tied up in the people, their interactions and their relationships, that the description was minimal, and focused mostly on the people, at the expense of the setting and the scenery, which in my view was a shame. There is so much to offer here - Hokitika as a gold mining town, the savage and spectacular Hokitika Harbour, the Maori land (of the time), the harsh climate, the hard work of a gold claim. So much opportunity gone begging.

The second problem I have is with the astrological gimmickry - and in my view it is gimmickry. The sections of the book follow a structure such that each chapter is approximately half the number of pages as the subsequent (first 360 pages, second 160- pages etc), assumed to be mimicking the phases of the moon, or a method to indicate a speeding up of the story/events. Each chapter title is also astrological in nature - examples: Sun in Capricorn; Moon in Taurus, Waxing; Saturn in Libra... etc At the front of the book the principle characters are attributed astrological signs, and other characters are attributed planetary influences. This ties through the whole story, but, it takes a significant amount of referring back to the list, and even so seems to contribute little extra to the narrative? I found the whole thing felt unnecessary.My second to last item on my complaint list - are the chapter headlines. For the first few chapters (say 600 pages) this isn't such a bit deal - one short sentence hinting at the contents. This is common enough is older books - it sort of annoys me in them too... However, once we get into the last few hundred pages, as the chapters become shorter and shorter the chapter headlines conversely become longer and longer. It reaches the peak-ridiculousness when the chapter title is longer than the chapter. Worse though, is the fact that the chapter titles begin adding information not found in the narrative - eg the chapter title reads "In which..." and outlines a sequence of events which are not covered by the chapter. To me this was just illustrating that the book couldn't conform to its own structure.Last complaint on the list gets a spoiler within the spoiler - even if you think you might read this book, just skip this one... I was annoyed by the magical realism. It wasn't advertised, and while I have read a few novels which are based on magical realism, I don't like to be surprised with it. OK call it Astral Twinning if you will, but for me I consider it a cheat after setting up the complex web of characters.
Ok, there were some positives, as I probably would have ditched it half way through if it were 2 stars - there are just too many other books I would read.

The complex web of characters are excellent, and would have taken a lot of planning, as it all seems to tie together pretty faultlessly. As a mystery, it was well crafted and complex, although the non-linear structure to release the information was annoying, the initial chapter where the majority of the characters are in a room together sharing their knowledge is an interesting and successful way of dumping the layer of initial information.

For me, it was a 3 star read.

I really couldn't get into this book. It was beautifully written, but could still not hold my attention.