Luminaries

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Average customer rating 4 (3 comments)

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Very long and after 200 pages could not get into it. It was a Book Club pick and it is probably the first book in 5 years I haven't finished regardless of length.... I did read the last 50 pages... I found it much too wordy without really clearly stating what the author was trying to articulate. Felt she was attempting good character development but felt her characters were introduced in such a manner that they weren't distinct from each other....Not recommended....

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Set in 1865-1866 in New Zealand during the gold rush, 13 men try to solve a bunch of local mysteries, involving a opium-addicted whore, a missing prospector, a recently deceased man with a wife that no one knew about and a scarred man that no one likes. This is a long book, but it is necessary to cover all the story taking place between those men and all those other people. I had no idea New Zealand had a gold rush so that was educational. This book is written like a Victorian-era book with each chapter giving a teaser about what it will be about. It is a bit like Charles Dickens without all the annoying Dickens bits (no unnecessary words!). It seemed to have a bit of a slow start but once one of the men started sharing his part of the tale to a guy, it picks up and doesn't stop. Hearing people telling their versions of stories and piecing it all together into a much larger story was fun. There was some astrological stuff that didn't make much sense to me and wasn't really explained so I skipped over that. I still enjoyed the overall story. When some of the backstory was pieced together by the men, the story shifts to real time where you learn even more about what happened from the other players. After that, the story wraps up with parts that the men never knew. It was a nice summary of the entire story, even though I still had a few unanswered questions at the end. Did I miss the answers in this 800+ book or were that not answered? Hard to tell.

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The Luminaries is, I think, a historic literary achievement. As I wrote in an online review on October 13: "If it doesn't win this year's Man Booker Prize, you'll be able to knock me over with a feather. Yeah, that's the most polite way to put it." I have had no feather related falls obviously. I cannot wait to read this novel again. It's a pleasure to read, and it bears substantial scholarly scrutiny as a work of literary art. I've commended novelists for their ambition in some of my previous reviews. Eleanor Catton's ambition is revealed first by the somewhat abstract astrological structure she sets up for her work -- it's the kind of move a book meant merely to entertain does not dare. It reminds me somewhat of James Joyce's modeling his masterwork about June 16th in the life of Dedalus and Bloom, Ulysses, after Homer's Odyssey. While Catton's pretense does not match that of Joyce, her execution of her work places it squarely within the same tradition of masterful examples of the novel. Also, as a sidenote, I found that some of Catton's prose reminded me of Joyce's in the penultimate catechism-type episode in Ulysses. I did not do a close side-by-side comparison, but that was the impression that jumped to the front of my mind as I read. In its scope and achievement, this work also calls to mind George Eliot's Middlemarch. To speak more of The Luminaries on its own terms, as really I ought: --There's poetry in this prose; it's everywhere evocative. --The narrative voice is free and easy; Catton doesn't give the sense that she's trying too hard. To write such a complex and masterful work so confidently blows my mind. If I were to characterize her narrative style altogether in a few words I would choose: playful, with an affectionate disposition to reader and the narrative itself. --Like other great novels I've mentioned in this review, it unites macroscopic and microscopic views of its subject matter and does so in a circumscribed setting in terms of time and place. This focuses the range of detail and ultimately epic effect of the work. The Luminaries is resplendent; you won't want to miss it, dear readers. All you English majors, dust off your rigorous analytical skills, and all you lovers of literature, dust off that part of your heart that feels great books. Some classic literature is happenin' here! I hope this helps; thanks for reading my ideas. Please be advised I read an electronic galley by generous permission of the publisher Little, Brown and Company.