PAGES UPON PAGES
The best book of the 2010s is Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, Calum Marsh writes.
Extravagantly arch and relentlessly stylized, humming with brainy brio and unapologetic precocity, Eleanor Catton’s debut novel, The Rehearsal, has an irresistible conceit.
It’s set at a high school for girls. The students talk like students, and the teachers talk like they’ve been written by Cormac Mccarthy.
“A film of soured breast milk clutches at your daughter like a shroud,” a saxophone teacher informs a hopeful parent, by way of saying she’s too young, on the book’s first page. The juxtaposition of styles is dazzling and ecstatic. You get sublime soliloquies and exquisite sentences. Then you get the teens.
Catton herself, shockingly, was hardly much older. Twenty-three at the time of publication, The Rehearsal was her master’s thesis, written under the aegis of the creative writing program at the Institute of Modern Letters at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington. Perhaps unavoidably, The Rehearsal was received mainly as a herald for the brilliance it presaged. Catton showed “promise,” some latent talent that would reveal itself in the future. I don’t think anyone expected it to reveal itself quite so soon.
Her second novel, The Luminaries, was published five years later in 2013, and was incontrovertible evidence of Catton’s gifts — not merely in chrysalis, but even in her 20s immense and fully formed.
The Luminaries is a morethan-800-page historical mystery with an ensemble that charts the signs of the zodiac. Its action has been mapped to stellar and planetary positions, and it’s dense and heady, constructed with such vigour that unpacking it is probably best left to students of literature hard at work on their own master’s theses.
This is a book that features hand-drawn astrological diagrams outlining what a prefatory note to the reader describes, a touch flamboyantly, as “the vast and knowing influence of the infinite sky.” Its chapters descend in page count from 361 to six according, naturally, to the shifting phases of the moon.
She’s no slouch, Catton. A prolix lunar epic, a bravura stargazing feat, the book is plainly monumental.
Of course, a novel worked out with such painstaking assiduousness does not exactly welcome new readers, and the size and density of The Luminaries alone has no doubt put many people off.
Happily, the book itself is not nearly so demanding. In fact, from almost the moment the story unfolds in earnest, this gargantuan thing is compulsively, addictively readable, fizzing with easy pleasure and line-by-line intrigue.
“Something was afoot: of this he was suddenly certain,” muses young Walter Moody, arriving at the beginning of the book to the lobby of a hotel in coastal New Zealand, where he is about to inadvertently intrude upon a fraught conclave. Something is afoot, all right. Catton lets Moody — and indeed the reader — in on it with a thriller writer’s command of nail-biting tension. For a work of such grand scope and formidable intricacy, it is remarkably forthcoming with satisfaction and entertainment.
Catton has confessed her admiration for modern cable dramas, and in terms of energy and momentum, The Luminaries does share much in common with the titans of prestige TV.
Even at 800 pages, the book lends itself to speedy reading, the literary fiction equivalent of the streaming-service bingewatch. A labyrinthine chronicle of a small prospecting town in 19th-century New Zealand, it concerns conspiracy, confidences, betrayal and murder
— all drawn together with the self-conscious exuberance of a novelist in daring, unwavering control.
This is a writer too smart to permit her genius book to feel stuffy, and too playful to allow her fun to feel broad. Teasing but never frivolous, cerebral but never pretentious, The Luminaries is a supremely great achievement, unsurpassed this decade.
Teasing but never frivolous, cerebral but never pretentious, The Luminaries is a supremely great achievement, unsurpassed this decade. Calum Marsh