ElCicco #CBR5 Review #52: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

This long read recently won the Booker Prize and has garnered much praise for its author, 28-year-old New Zealander Eleanor Catton. It’s an ambitious project, and every review I’ve read of it references Catton’s emulation of 19th century novels, a la Charles Dickens. The Luminaries, like a soap opera, involves a large caste of characters and complicated, intersecting story lines. Once you get through the first 400 pages, it starts to come together and gets a little easier to follow. I kept thinking as I was reading that it would make a wonderful mini-series (and would be easier to follow and keep everyone straight).

The novel opens on a dark and stormy night. Really. A weary traveler named Walter Moody stumbles upon a meeting of a dozen unusual men, men who wouldn’t seem to have any common cause. But of course they do, and it’s complicated, with each man telling his piece of the story. In short, it involves the murder of hermit Crosbie Wells, missing person emery Staines, drug-addled whore Anna, gold, and a very bad man with scar on his face. Catton spins her story both backward and forward, and between the dozen men at the meeting plus another half dozen or so important characters, it gets rather hard to manage at times.

One aspect of the novel I found confusing had to do with the gold. The story unfolds in an 1860s gold rush town in New Zealand called Hokitika. Catton has done extensive research on the gold rush and gets her economics and society facts straight, but the plot lines that involve gold — who’s got it, where did it come from and where is it now — read like a literary form of 3-card monte. I suppose it’s intentional, keeping the reader as confused and in the dark as the twelve men trying to find out what happened to the Wells, Staines and Anna. But then there’s the complication of the missing trunks (more than one!) and one character stealing another’s identity to commit financial fraud.

Another aspect of the novel that was lost on me had to do with astrology. The luminaries — sun and moon — refer to two particular characters, and the 12 men each stand for a sign of the zodiac. Each chapter begins with a chart of the zodiac for that particular day and how particular characters interacted with each other on that day. A character named Lydia, who works as both a madam and amateur astrologer, leads seances and reads people’s charts for them. Perhaps this is simply Catton showing popular interest in astrology at that time, but I’m sure there is some deeper, greater significance to all this astrological stuff that I’m just missing.

Still, I was willing to remain bewildered over the economics and astrology thanks to the brilliantly drawn and diverse characters and a story that holds together well if you stick it out to the end. The hookers here do not have hearts of gold, the Chinese miners are abused and not considered worthy of consideration, the pharmacist deals in opium, a politician is being blackmailed, and Walter Moody may or may not have seen a ghost. Striking it rich, forgetting one’s past and exacting revenge seem to be common goals on the frontier, and that makes for good reading.

The end of the novel does not provide the reader with all loose ends tied up neatly in a bow, but it was a satisfying resolution to me. On the whole, I liked the novel quite a lot. It can be a bit of a slog at first, but once you see the connections among the characters and the facts of their pasts slowly work their way forward, it’s an engrossing story.

Valyruh’s #CBR5 Review #91: Celebrity in Death by J.D. Robb

I don’t usually waste my time reviewing pulp novels, but this one had a little more oomph to it and a little less fluff, and I so thought it worth a few stars and commentary. A movie is being made about the infamous Incove case covered in Robb’s Origin in Death novel, and top-flight Hollywood stars have been chosen to portray our heroines Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her partner Detective Delia Peabody, along with their respective spouses, co-workers, and inner circle. The real NYC cops Dallas and Peabody are obliged to consult periodically with their fictional counterparts, and a fabulous dinner for the real people and their celebrity dopplegangers at the home of the film’s producer turns into Eve’s next case when the star playing Peabody is discovered floating face down in the home’s rooftop pool. Accident or murder?

It turns out that everyone disliked K.T., a drug-abusing (if talented) bully with a penchant for blackmail, and while nearly everyone had a motive for murder, there isn’t enough evidence to pin it on anyone. But Eve, ever the bulldog and assisted by her gorgeous billionaire husband and his electronic wizardry, begins to chip away at the case until it starts to reveal itself. The plot is well-constructed, the characters are colorful, the sex scenes are—for once—kept to a minimum and more tastefully done than usual (although the book’s language is a little spicier), there’s a little more humor, and while Eve is portrayed as hard-ass as ever, she does begin to show a more vulnerable side as she digs into the backstories of some of the characters she is investigating. I would say that It is about time that the author allows Eve to grow a little, and not stay the same cardboard action figure she has been for so many of the “In Death” novels.

Equally interesting, I thought, was the picture the author portrays of Hollywood. While not unfamiliar to your average American audience, the fact that Hollywood is neither all black nor all white—neither corrupt and seedy, nor all glitter and glitz—gives this story a certain verisimilitude that resonates. Good for you, Nora.