#indiechallenge – The Luminaries (Eleanor Catton)

The blurb

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction.

The author

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. She won the 2007 Sunday Star-Times short-story competition, the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the 2008 Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary and was named as one of Amazon’s Rising Stars in 2009. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Betty Trask Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix Femina literature award, the abroad category of the Prix Médicis, the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize 2010 and Stonewall’s Writer of the Year Award 2011, and longlisted for the Orange Prize 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the New Zealand Arts Foundation New Generation Award. The Luminaries was the winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Award.

The publisher

Granta Books is an independent publisher based in Cambridge, with a very long About page.

The bookshop

Downloaded, boringly, from Kobo.

The bingo card

This could count towards: ‘An author from another country’; ‘A new to you press’ (I think); ‘A press over 20 years old’; ‘An award winner’; and ‘Book that defies genre’.

My thoughts

I’ve often seen this in bookshops and charity shops and thought what a lovely cover it has (neither my ebook reader nor my photograph do it justice), but I would probably never have got around to buying or reading it had my office book club, which has a penchant for award-winners, not picked it for the September meeting. Since we were reading this one over the summer, there was time to tackle the nine hundred or so pages of it.

And I absolutely loved it. I’ve a weakness for nineteenth century doorstops, and this included many of the things I like about them: a twisty, turny plot full of mystery, melodrama, and the supernatural (the latter almost but not quite explained away); treasure hunts and missing documents; vividly-drawn characters; an omniscient but selective narrator.

But it also subverted them. It brought twenty-first century nuance to questions of race and, to a lesser extent, gender; it did something very interesting with chapter headings, and it gave almost all of the characters at least a moment in which they were sympathetic. There was a humanity and a generosity to it that kept me reading. Quite apart, of course, from its being a whole lot of fun.