The Luminaries (Catton)
Let's start this review with something that's just housekeeping, not criticism. I read this book as part of a CanLit project. It won the (Canadian) Governor General's award, after all. But this is CanLit only by the most attenuated of courtesies; Catton may have been born in Canada, but she grew up in New Zealand, lives in New Zealand, and writes about New Zealand. This is a New Zealand novel.
I liked this New Zealand novel a very great deal. Yes, the book was hard to heft in a purely physical sense, and the opening, where you are dealing with multiple inset narratives and a dozen and a half new characters, needs either great concentration or the willingness to go back and start again several times, as I ended up having to do because of too-long gaps in reading. The payoff of the unusual structure of the novel is that while you spend the first half or so grasping at the facts through masses of evocative detail, you discover as the chapters grow tighter and more focused that you have most of the pieces of the puzzle, and by the time you reach the tiny blips of prose which are the final segments, you are an expert in this particular narrative and can supply all the context you need. Looking at the cover illustration after I finished, I realized that, as well as being a representation of the waning of the moon, it also represents the narrative strategy of the novel, which starts with huge amounts of information, at the global level, as it were, and ends with merely a tiny sliver which nonetheless conveys everything you need to know. The subject of the cover "information", tellingly enough, is a young woman, and though the book at first seems to be democratically dividing the importance of the characters amongst a round dozen people, in the end it's the young woman (Anna) who's key.
I'm not going to spoil the plot of this thing. Though it's not by any means a conventional mystery, discovering what's what is at least half of the joy of the book. (The other half is the very interesting historical depiction of a remote and racially diverse gold rush society, so underpopulated that multiple connections between characters, which might in a populous setting seem otherwise unrealistic, seem entirely plausible ).
There is an apparatus of astrology attached to the title and to the chapter headings of the novel. I'm happy to report that for those who are too lazy or too uninterested to try to decipher it, it's completely unnecessary for the understanding of the story. It's entirely possible that taking the trouble to figure it out would add another layer of understanding, or perhaps another way to appreciate Catton's craftsmanship, but I must admit I didn't bother too much with it.
I won't lie: reading The Luminaries is an undertaking. I think most readers will find that, once undertaken, it's well worth it. Though it's only very barely Canadian, I think we'll claim it anyway!
