If you know only two things about The Luminaries by Auckland writer Eleanor Catton (VUP) most likely they will be that the novel is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and that it is vastly long - more than 800 pages. This is a book of such heft that I circled it warily for some time, half-peeved with Catton for presuming to take up so much of my time.
And when I did start to read I got thumb strain from holding the thing open. Was it worth it? Yes, I think so. For what Catton has created is a book that is as extraordinary as it is lengthy.
Set in rain-scalded Hokitika during the gold rush of the 1860s, the story opens on a stormy night as a new arrival, Charles Moody, enters the smoking room of the Crown Hotel. There he finds 12 men and very soon discovers they are not gathered there by accident. Each is somehow linked to the events of a night two weeks previously when a local hermit died, a wealthy prospector disappeared, an opium-addicted prostitute attempted suicide and a fortune of gold was discovered. All these pieces of plot are linked in a Rubik's Cube of a mystery that is precisely peopled and finely detailed.
Complex things are going on here beneath the narrative. The book has an astrological structure and Catton says she worked out its events using charts she drew up. Its style is a pastiche of 19th-century writing.
