WORDS ALICIA BYRNE KEANE

The Luminaries is a protracted 832-page undertaking, borrowing its structure from a number of sources — among them lunar phases, 19th century astrological charts, and the teeming, pluralized perspective of the Romantic period. Furthermore its author, Eleanor Catton, is 28 years old. Equipped with such information, the reader naturally enters with caution: expecting an amateur writer’s sprawling attempt at an epic. However, The Luminaries avoids such neat categorization, and I was unprepared for its charms.

Set in the gold rush of 1860s New Zealand, Catton’s novel documents the aftermath of a series of unexplained events in the coastal mining town of Hokitika. An alcoholic hermit is found dead, with a considerable fortune in gold sequestered about his house; an opium-addicted prostitute is brought to prison unconscious following what appears to be a suicide attempt; the wealthy young Emery Staines has disappeared; and a ship’s captain has fled Hokitika in the dead of night. The novel focuses on the subsequent efforts of a group of twelve men, each with a checkered past of his own, to make sense of these incidents. In the process we bear witness to a séance of questionable motive, a discovery of hidden value in a ship’s cargo, bullets which disappear when fired, and the ravaging effects of opium.

Despite the themes on which it centres, The Luminaries reads less as a chain of sensational phenomena, and more as a sensitive exploration of human relationships in tension with the destructive drive of wealth. Catton replicates the Romantic narrative down to the last nuance, with heavily adorned prose and a flair for the psychological portrait. Take, for example, her documentation of character Walter Moody: “Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior.”

However, Catton juxtaposes a modern awareness with these more traditional touches. Set in colonial times, the novel neatly avoids the stereotypes often attributed to the “natives” in the novels of the era. While documenting the stigma and otherness leveled at these characters by their Western-born counterparts, Catton eschews such exoticism in her portrayals. Far from being passive representations, her “native” characters have personal histories essential to the plot. A similar observation could be made on the character of Anna Wetherell, a prostitute. As opposed to being portrayed as a bawdy joke or an allegory, Anna is an autonomous figure, largely accepted as an equal in Hokitika’s insular society. At times it feels as though Catton is rewriting the Victorian novel from a perspective of modern sensitivity.

The novel is not without its weak points — the sheer volume of its characters, for example, leaves us little time to grow attached to any one hero, despite Catton’s well-paced depiction of their motives and backgrounds.  And, while it becomes more evident as the sections shorten towards the end, the novel’s correspondence with the phases of the moon often bears a tenuous significance to the plot. A final noteworthy point is that the novel leaves much unresolved — however, it is up to the reader to see this as an inconsistency or as a nod to the ephemeral nature of the 19th century narrative. Either way, the intertwining plots are so expertly crafted, their points of connection so well thought out, that the dénouement is nonetheless satisfying.

It seems that contemporary literature has become preoccupied with the process of stripping down, whether through the colloquial voice of Junot Diaz, or Jonathan Franzen’s clinical precision. However, such aesthetics have been so influential that it is difficult for the up-and-coming author to know how to build on this movement with originality. In an increasingly minimalist literary landscape, where does one turn to innovate? The Luminaries is sumptuous, involved, excessive. Its sweeping poetry may not be to everybody’s taste, but Catton’s style provokes the question — has brevity become a tired technique? Is it time for a return to opulence?