Spinning a genre into a foxy tale

Reading this year’s Booker winner, The Luminaries, is like reading many novels rolled into one — and for reasons beyond its ice-block thick, 800-page plus bulk: it is part Victorian novel, part whodunit, part romance, part history novel and even flirts with being a supernatural mystery. It is undoubtedly a stylistic feat and one that Eleanor Catton pulls off. Its immense size, undoubtedly a nightmare for publishers, is not without its perils for the reader as well. For one thing, Catton employs many tricks of the trade, using multiple perspectives and replaying a few central events relating to one single day over and over until it is entirely probably for one to feel, mid-book, a droop in interest and concentration.

However, a little persistence is richly rewarded by Catton who eventually pulls together every plotline in a well-modulated climax that spans several chapters; they fit in Russian-doll style, one into another, until one is left with the last chapter, barely a page long, that is the unpolished kernel of the story. 

In this Catton is playing with an old-fashioned device, and probably not entirely in earnest, since the closest we come to an evil villain is a con woman who affects to be an astrologer and medium for séances. Nevertheless, Catton keeps an astrological theme running through her book.

Twenty-eight-year-old Frank Moody arrives in 1866 at the gold rush town Hokitika in New Zealand. It is overrun with prospectors but already sporting a jail-in-progress, a harbour, a local newspaper, hotels, saloons, brothels, banks and a courthouse. Moody is a type of Everyman in this newly birthed town; he seeks a chance to reinvent himself, leaving behind his barrister’s degree and family history to begin anew as a prospector in the gold fields. He takes boarding at the Crown Hotel only to descend to the smoking room, right in the middle of a tense gathering between a disparate cast of characters.

At first it appears that there is an elaborate plot in place and each of the 12 men is being framed, and almost all of them are involved in some way with a prostitute named Anna who is both an opium addict, and has a heart of gold.

The men are gathered to investigate the disappearance of a vast quantity of gold and the possible murder of a blue-eyed-boy prospector named Edward Staines, whose luck, it appears, may have run out in the end.

The whole thing seems impossibly entangled, the story comes to us mostly in second- and third-hand retellings that twist back to one single day’s events, and “this very circular affair” appears determined by the astrological patterns Catton draws.

Catton shows a masterful control over both plot and background with her seemingly authentic capturing of the day-to-day affairs of this bygone period.

Karishma Attari is a book critic and freelance writer living in Mumbai. She is working on her coming-of-age novel, 'I See You'.