The Book:
“It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to
make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the night of his arrival,
he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in
secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a
whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in
the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network
of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night
sky. It is written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a
mid-19th century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it
is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery.” Ref:Booktopia It was the
winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize.
Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada
and raised in New Zealand. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria
University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The
Rehearsal. She was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to
study for a year at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in the US and went
on to hold a position as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing there, teaching
Creative Writing and Popular Culture. Eleanor won a 2010 New Generation Award.
She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
The Luminaries is “a thrilling achievement
for someone still in her mid-twenties, and will confirm for critics and readers
that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing
firmament.” Ref: Booktopia
The Review:
“Catton has created her own world in The
Luminaries – an upside-down, southern hemisphere kind of a place with its own
astrological calendar that casts its own kind of influence, its own light. The
clue is in the title, after all, and in the confusing frontispiece that the publishers
might have made more of, to alert the general reader to the fabulous trick of
the book they hold: that this great, intricately crafted doorstopper of a
historical novel, with its portentous introduction, astrological tables,
character charts and all the rest, in fact weighs nothing at all.” Kirsty Dunn
for The Guardian
“So I found The Luminairies a master
writer's/crtitic's dream, but as a story... well sentence by sentence it is
beautifully crafted, but the shear number of them in relation to one scene, or
description (particulary at the the beginning) wore me down. Characters were so
many, their voices seem to merge into the same sound. They began to form a
crowd in my mind, all speaking the same voice, their personalties
indiscernible. The astrology was lost on me.” Luke for Good Reads
I couldn’t agree more with the above review
written by Luke. The early parts of the book, the first 200 pages, were
complicated and laborious reading. Most of our book club members who
attempted to read the book agreed. Some put the book away and didn’t bother
reading it. But those of us that persevered and completed the 832 pages were
surprised how much we enjoyed the book and wanted to find out what happened.
This was no easy read; it contained numerous characters all with their own
stories and connections to other characters. The main plot finishes by page 628
but the book continues on with a back fill, the past history of the two main
characters Anna Wetterthal and Emery Staines, their initial meeting on a boat
entering Dunedin harbour until their final coming together and declaration of
love on the last page. The structure of this book has other quirky
elements: the chapter lengths got shorter and shorter until by the end of
the book some were half a page long, the astrological charts at the beginning
of each chapter didn’t seem to have a connection to the story or none that I
could see. I finished the book, the largest and most complicated I have read
and felt an achievement in doing so. So many times, early in the reading, I had
to force myself to pick it up again. It is a massive book with very small print
on its 832 pages. It weighs heavy for a novel and I found it uncomfortable to
hold for too long. The plot left me with some unanswered questions at the end
like who killed the main antagonist, Francis Carver?
Thanks to Margaret Cassidy for the review
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