I had been on the library waiting list for The Luminaries since the Man Booker longlist was announced, so I was pretty excited to finally get the call to go pick it up a few weeks after it had already been chosen as the winner. As the librarian took it from the hold shelf, she looked at the moon phases on the book's cover and said, "Now that looks like an interesting book."
I said, knowingly, "Yes, it should be good since it won the Booker."
Her eyes were glazed with disinterest or incomprehension. "Well, what I mean is it's so heavy." Turning the book over in her hands and seeing the maple leaf on its spine, she added, "And it's Canadian, too."
I said, "Well, the author was born in Canada but raised in New Zealand -- I don't imagine she considers herself Canadian."
"Well," she laughed, "we take what we can get, eh?"
It was in this aura of literary snobbery -- one in which I assumed I was in for an artistic and enlightening experience, one that might even go over the head of my local librarian -- that I began reading The Luminaries. I was immediately intrigued by the Victorian language and structure of the book, especially the little summaries at the beginning of each chapter (In which this and this happens…) and I could recognise that Eleanor Catton was no small talent; it was impossible to not be impressed by how note-perfect every word and phrase was; here was a true wordsmith.
I was fascinated by the introduction of the first character, Walter Moody, and the mystery hinted at as he unwittingly interrupts a conference of twelve men in a hotel smoking room. I relished the mental image that I had of these men: hastily arranging themselves in innocent poses -- asleep in a chair by the fire, nonchalantly reading an old newspaper, picking up pool cues and pretending to play -- and then stopping dead-still in their charades and leaning ever so noticeably closer to Moody as he began to relate to one of their number a tale of interest to their meeting -- the setup proved to be gripping and curious. And then it fizzled out for me.
The first 361 pages are set in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel with each of the twelve men and Moody himself relating their parts in the central mysteries of the book: the wealthiest man in the small New Zealand gold mining outpost went missing; a fortune in gold was discovered in the shack of a dead hermit; and the town's favourite prostitute attempted an opium overdose. In this beginning portion, the book introduces each character, moving backwards and forward in time, overlapping each other's tales, and pointedly does nothing to solve the mysteries. I had some real life distractions while reading this part, but I don't think that my slow reading was solely to blame for my confusion: I couldn't keep the characters straight, despite the cast of characters listed in beginning, and there were just too many, met out of any kind of order, for me to understand their relationships to each other. Helpfully, at this point Moody recaps everything he's been told so far, putting the events in chronological order, and I could almost say that this is where the book truly begins -- after 361 pages.
The Luminaries made much more sense to me after this point, and although I continued to enjoy the sentence-by-sentence language of the book, the overall story didn't do much for me: despite the convoluted plot, it doesn't seem clever upon reflection -- merely weighted down. This novel had a Dickensian feel but the main difference between Dickens and Catton is that the former had a sort of love for his readers -- the plot twists in a Dickens novel are surprising but organic; readers of all abilities can be delighted when a near-forgotten character returns from abroad with the fortune owing to the young orphan or whatever. Catton, on the other hand, seemed to be writing for the literati: even the structure of The Luminaries is a strict literary exercise -- there are twelve parts, each half as long as the one preceding it, mimicking the waning of the moon, and the original twelve men of the Crown Hotel smoking room represent each of the astrological signs, their personalities described accordingly (and at great length, seeming to break the show-don't-tell rule). The most curious thing about this book, to me at least, was the dabbling in the supernatural -- and I think it would be rather easy to keep parts of a mystery unsolved over 800 pages if in the end it can be blamed on the stars. It really felt like a cheat that Anna and Emery were "astral soul-mates", explaining why Anna accidentally firing a gun at herself actually shoots Emery somewhere off in the wilderness, or how he, lost and stumbling through that wilderness, causes Anna to nearly starve to death.
In the end, The Luminaries didn't really work for me, and despite my pretensions of literary snobbishness, this book didn't connect with me the way it must have with the big prize juries. While I was reading it, The Luminaries was also awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award, meant to honour the best in Canadian literature. This made me a little sad -- it's one thing to, like my local librarian, be proud to claim an author as our own based on her place of birth, but it's another to celebrate her with a prize meant to acknowledge that which is Canadian. The most beautiful part of The Luminaries is when Catton describes the New Zealand landscape and its people; this was a thoroughly Kiwi book, as it should be, celebrating the land and history of the country that Catton so clearly loves. We have enough of our own stories in Canada, enough incredibly talented Canadian authors, that I'm a bit offended on their behalf by this grasp at reflected glory.
