Second coming

Eleanor Catton’s sophomore novel is as equally astonishing as her much-lauded Rehearsal, writes Steve Walker.

NEW ZEALANDER Eleanor Catton’s career has been astounding. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, trailed clouds of glory from many foreign newspapers. She earned plaudits like ‘‘wildly brilliant and precocious’’ from no less than the New York Times and, according to the Guardian, she displayed ‘‘dazzling authorial control’’, while her novel was ‘‘astonishing’’. It was a debut to die for.

The Rehearsal’s incredible success, however, created a major problem. How to follow it up?

Catton’s second novel, The Luminaries, is equally astonishing. At a flabbergasting 830 pages, it is a New Zealand first. Our first epic postmodern novel – or rather series of novels, all rolled into one exhaustive saga.

And what a saga. Part detective tale, part crime thriller, part romance, part frontier adventure, it sparks off a wide range of other texts and styles, all wrapped in a wonderful pastiche of a Victorian crime novel, like a Wilkie Collins. It recalls A S Byatt’s Victorian pastiche, Possession.

Set on the wet West Coast during the gold rush of the 1860s, it depicts the bedraggled luminaries of Hokitika as they unravel a murder, a disappearance and a theft. One by one, characters are entangled in these mysteries until the whole town has a part to play. The effect is Balzacian, a sense of a real and whole community.

A recent arrival from the Motherland, Walter Moody is, at 28, a discreet respecter of confidences. He seems an ideal guide to this developing, complex mystery. Hokitika, at his first sight, looks squalid and filthy – a frontier town where diggers come to sell gold and celebrate their success or drown their sorrows. For both, there are three options; booze or women or both. Moody talks to Thomas Balfour, the local shipping agent. Balfour, too, suggests another Victorian mystery tale, Stevenson’s Kidnapped. On Moody’s voyage from Dunedin, there has been an extra passenger; a bloody coffin.

The coffin is linked to goldfields magnate, Dick Mannering. As Mannering unfolds his story, it transpires there has been a major theft of gold, a lone digger has been found dead and a local whore has collapsed in an opiate haze. The bloody coffin has links to all three.

Moody begins to realise that two worlds have collided here. One is of ‘‘rolling time and shifting places’’ and the other is a ‘‘small, stilled world of horror and unease’’. He suspects that not all is as it appears to be – ironic, given that he himself has travelled under a pseudonym. He thinks Balfour is ‘‘performing a role’’.

This notion of life as a series of performative guises is central to Catton’s The Rehearsal. Moody is not the only one to have a false name. In this lonely outpost at the bottom of the world, wedged between ‘‘the savage and the civil’’, everyone has changed in some way in coming there. Nobody’s story is to be believed. All act, in both senses of the word. Their performances are all highly mannered.

As in The Rehearsal, Catton explores a diverse range of narrative threads, all of which are woven into this tapestry of