Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

It is a book vast both in its scope and in its detail, Eleanor Catton's Booker-winning novel The Luminaries, and it is on that account that I shall set down here only a scattering or a sketch of the long experience of having been immersed in its company, travelling as we have through New Zealand's....

No. 

Listen, it's a massive novel, 832 pages, and I'd be giving too little credit if I said its plotting was fiendishly intricate. Catton has done a wonderful job of mimicking vaguely Victorian prose, and she's imagined impressively a group of complicated, mostly real-seeming characters whose relations are utterly byzantine.

I'm doubting that it'll sell well to the Beer & Books Club when we get to it this summer, but I've been surprised before. For me, The Luminaries is a wildly impressive novel that ... well, left me cold. Catton won the Booker in 2013, and I've seen lots of positive reviews from readers I'd normally trust, so I blame myself, but there it is.

Maybe if I understood astrology, or wanted to? Each of the book's twelve parts comes with a star chart for a specific date in 1865 or 1866, with a latitude and longitude reading; each chart has the names of twelve men, all of whom we meet in the book's first part as a kind of conspiracy and/or story-telling circle, with symbols of various kinds placed in some of the names' associated pie-slices. I didn't try to interpret these, which I'll accept is a sin and a personal failing, but I was already giving the book attention for 800-plus pages, so I chose not to give it more time than that. 

At heart, it's a love story, except that the romance plot is almost entirely buried beneath colonialism, tales of the gold rush, crime stories of various kinds (some of them overlapping, some of them cancelling others out in ways recognized neither by the characters nor by the readers until several hundred more pages have passed), drug trafficking and addiction, and marine mercantilism.

The Luminaries is an amazing book, but strangely I come away from it feeling unclear that there's any point or purpose whatever to it. If this novel changed your life or overwhelmed you, well, I congratulate you and apologize, but I think that it won't be long before I've forgotten almost the whole experience of these last weeks in its company. It's an amazing book, certainly, but not for me, and I've been startled to realize that that's how I was going to feel.