Eleanor Catton's Booker prize-winning novel, The Luminaries.
About 8 members gathered to discuss this very large novel set in the New Zealand goldfields in the nineteenth century. Not all of us had
read all 832 pages, and as usual our reactions varied. Some liked it and others
were disappointed. Some found it a very good read just as a mystery, others
felt that after all the complexity the book was “hollow”.
The first 200 pages took some concentration as many
characters were introduced. We found the recapitulation of the plot at about
page 320 very useful as all the jumping about in time and different points of
view took some getting used to. We discussed the complexity of the plot for
some time, wondering if the author had an enormous flow chart on her wall as
she wrote, some of us feeling that there were considerable holes in the plot
and others querying whether we were supposed to care about that.
The characters were well drawn and interesting, including
“shady characters like the Wild West”. We found the interactions between the
characters were often very perceptive, one of us commenting that the young
author seemed “emotionally precocious”.
We couldn’t agree whether the two main characters underwent any real character
development though, and wondered whether they were even meant to?
The book had a nineteenth century feel to it in some ways.
One of us was reminded of Thomas Hardy and another of Dickens. Each character
was introduced in a quite theatrical nineteenth century way, and each chapter
had an introductory summary. We enjoyed the joke that in the later chapters the
summaries became the actual story and if we had made the mistake of skipping
them we then had to backtrack. There was some racism and other nods towards
nineteenth century attitudes. However the book does not moralise as do many
period novels. We enjoyed the sense of place created, for example by the
description of the rain in Hokitika. We noticed the humour, for example when
Nillson inadvertently ended up as the generous donor.
We wondered what the book was actually about. Truth and
lies? That there are many sides to a story? “Some things are never done” so
once set in train things don’t get resolved? The deceptiveness of appearances –
for example in the séance? The structure of the book was surprising. There was
a lot of build up to the court scene but it was not the climax. Each chapter was half the length of the
preceding one.
We noticed that the whole book was structured around the
zodiac, and each character in it represented a different force. Some of us felt
that this distorted the story and made it and the characters less believable
and meaningful. For some it was largely just decoration. Others found that
astrology worked as an interesting way to interpret the world.
Everyone agreed that this book gave us a lot to talk about.
