Tangled tale of murder in the outback and skeletons in the closet
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta, £18.99)
The self-consciously experimental style of Eleanor Catton’s debut, The Rehearsal (2007), left us unsure if we were reading about a high-school sex scandal or a performance by drama students reconstructing the affair.
Her Man Booker-longlisted new novel — set in the 1860s during the gold rush in New Zealand — seems on first sight a retrograde step into Victorian pastiche. There’s some primly obliterated profanity (“d—n”), much dutiful period spelling (“connexion”, “to-morrow”) and a worldly-wise narrator passably impersonating George Eliot.
But you soon see that Catton’s preoccupation remains how to arrive at the splintered nature of truth — and if anything, her approach here is yet more kaleidoscopic. The book is essentially a fine-grained slab of detective fiction that cultivates mystery not through coy opacity but with a knotty crisscross of story upon story.
The tangled tale turns on the murder of Wells, a prospector who had just struck gold in the mining settlement of Hokitika after many years of penury. His body is discovered not long after he was spotted with a prominent politician, Lauderback, whose election hopes make him ripe for blackmail by a crooked sailor set to wed the dead man’s widow. Other characters in the mix include a drug-addicted prostitute with a claim on Wells’s loot, and her Chinese dealer, out to avenge the death of his father during the opium wars.
Catton frames the narrative around the arrival of Scottish lawyer Moody, who spends his first night listening to various local worthies trying to solve Wells’s murder over drinks in a hotel.
Yet despite his role in a decisive courtroom scene, Moody isn’t the central character — the novel sets aside such conventions to usher each of its vast cast slowly into view as events unspool and replay in long conversations about what really took place.
If you don’t think it’s possible to get excited about a story that concerns the finer points of insurance policy, there’s plenty of high drama, too, with more murders before the end, and any number of tense stand-offs between proud men and women with skeletons in the closet.
It’s awesomely — even bewilderingly — intricate but most puzzling of all is the novel’s astrological patterning. A zodiac precedes each chapter and at one point the narrator tells us that “the double fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ouroboros of mind — both the will of fate, and the fated will”. These statements seem central to the novel yet the only character to take such things seriously is Lydia, a madam who tricks young women fresh off the boat into servicing clients at her boarding house — so not exactly trustworthy.
There’s an immaculate finish to Catton’s prose, which is no mean feat in a novel that lives or dies by its handling of period dialogue. It’s more than 800 pages long but the reward for your stamina is a double-dealing world of skulduggery traced in rare complexity — those Booker judges will have wrists of steel if it makes the shortlist, as it fully deserves.
Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £14.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p
