THE LUMINARIES
Eleanor Catton
Granta, UK
832 pages; Rs 799
Before you read on, let's get the elephant out of the room: this book has won the 2013 Man Booker Prize and its author, Eleanor Catton, is the youngest ever to do so. And it is not objective of the review to comment on whether the book deserved the prize or not.
The Luminaries tells a fantastic story - though it could have been done in fewer pages - and uses several interesting narrative devices to do that. It is also possible that this book will unleash a rush of fictional tomes in the market; Garth Risk Hallberg's 900-page debut novel that has set the publishing world aflutter is a case in point.
This book, like many worthy predecessors in film and print, is inspired by the gold rushes of the 19th century. Writers have been drawn towards those events and the emotions fuelled by greed for the yellow metal and several have turned them into riveting accounts, fictional as well as non-fictional. Ms Catton's research into the period is impeccable, as is her mastery over her craft. What, however, sets this novel apart is the way she mixes two contrasting worlds: the chaotic and messy jumble of people and emotions in the town of Hokitika, which was the centre of New Zealand's gold rush, against the orderly and structured backdrop of the 12 signs of the zodiac. Fate plays her hand silently, threading together apparently disparate occurrences into a neat plot that unfolds over 12 chapters with 12 stellar characters and seven planetary ones.
The structure not only is unusual and grabs attention but also anchors the story, which then moves back and forth between characters and events without a stumble. Ms Catton is always in control, as the mistress of her characters' fates and as the storyteller. While this gives her a firm hand with which she deals out the cards for her characters, the downside is that the characters are too well defined. They don't take unexpected twists and their behaviour rarely deviates from the lengthy and detailed frameworks that the author sets out. None has much of an option but to follow the charts as set out in the stars.
The concept of marrying the zodiac to a story is novel and appears to be a complex task, but (I suspect) it helped the author manage an elaborate plot without losing the thread. One stormy night, a seasick and weary traveller finds himself in a room with 12 men of dark secrets discussing mysterious events. A prostitute has attempted to take her own life, a hermit is found dead with a pile of gold, a rich man has disappeared, and these are all linked to each other as well as the men in the room. It takes over 800 pages for the mysteries to untangle themselves from the knots that the author has tied - an untangling she manages with remarkable firmness and ease. Explaining her affinity towards the zodiac, Ms Catton said in an interview, it "is incredibly psychologically complex, I think. As a sequence, it makes a great deal of harmonic sense: you know, the 12 signs from Aries through to Pisces really are a 12-part story, and each sign kind of rejects the principles of the sign that precedes it. And reacts against them, in a funny kind of way"(http://goo.gl/ Z0IrXX).
This book uses overlapping conversations to reveal the plot. The puzzle is pieced together by listening to what one character says to another. For the reader, this can be heady as well as confusing because the characters speak to each other - sometimes at the same time and in contradictory tones. This can get tiresome, especially since there is a murder to be solved and a lot of the deduction is taking place through dialogue. The other problem with such a device is that it gets repetitive: for instance, when the people talk about Francis Carver, he is called a thug and a conniving convict who parted ways with his father in far too many words and way too many times.
On the bright side, dialogue helps bring out multiple perspectives. Unlike the parlour of Hercule Poirot in which one man reveals all with a flourish, the deduction happens with every character offering his or her view of events. We not only get to know the person well but also snatch an insight into those talking about him or her. The effect is somewhat like a Facebook post where comments reveal the nature of the person writing it and his or her view of the writer. A case in point is Anna Wetherell. The manager of the Gridiron Hotel, Edward Clinch, finds her to be "the rarest and most troubled creature he had ever known, and he swore that he would not rest until she was beloved. He secured his best room for her, and pampered her in all the ways that he was able, but he became very hurt when she did not notice the efforts he had made - and when she did not notice his hurt, he became angry…."
Anna is a character about whom there is no one who does not hold an opinion. The paleness of Anna, her weak frame, her extreme addiction to opium and her troubled face is how almost every character in the book reads her. Unfortunately, this gets repetitive. Still, this is a minor flaw given that the jabber of conversations yields gold dust for the reader.
