"The Luminaries"

"The Luminaries"   is the Man Booker Prize winning  work of   Eleanor Catton
                             
            WE BRING BEFORE YOU  A SHORT              
                     APPRECIATION OF THE WORK
  

Beginning  with an intricate, self-consciously Victorian plot, of the page-turning sort that Sarah Waters gives us in "Fingersmith." Mix with the psychologically intense, cat-and-mouse dialogue that characterizes the novels of Henry James. Add the moral and philosophical vision of George Eliot. Bake in a deliberately mythic structure that calls to mind James Joyce's "Ulysses."

What emerges is 28-year-old Eleanor Catton's "The Luminaries," an 848-page dish so fresh that one continues to gorge, long past being crammed full of goodness. Nearly impossible to put down, it's easily the best novel I've read this year. The Man Booker judges feel the same way, having just given her this year's prize.

Set in the New Zealand of the 1860s, "The Luminaries" begins on a dark and stormy night in the gold-rush town of Hokitika as Walter Moody, recently arrived from Scotland, unwittingly interrupts a gathering of twelve men upon entering a hotel smoking room.

There's a goldsmith, a gem hunter and the owner of an opium den. A banker, a journalist and a chaplain. A law clerk, a hotelier and a chemist. A shipping agent, a gold-field magnate and a general contractor. Nine of the men are white. Two are Chinese. One is Maori.

Gradually, they begin to tell Moody a multi-layered story about three events that took place one night, two weeks earlier. A hermit named Crosbie Wells died in his cabin outside of town. Emery Staines, rich and young, suddenly disappeared. Anna Wetherell, an opium-addicted prostitute with Emery that night, was found comatose, sprawled in the middle of the road.

Each of the twelve men in the room with Moody was somehow involved in what happened. They collectively connect the dots by borrowing every stock device from the Victorian blockbuster, in a novel that also adopts 19th-century fiction's orthography and its habit of beginning every chapter with an italicized summary of what's to come.

There's a chanced-upon fortune in gold, repeatedly stolen. Corseted dresses containing hidden pockets. Chests with buried treasure. Mysterious bequests in secret documents. Conniving lawyers and ruthless convicts. Smuggling galore. Lost and bastard brothers. Madonnas and whores. Opium and alcohol. Forgery and extortion.

As if this weren't enough, Catton has assigned each of her twelve men a sign in the zodiac, with matching character traits; the hotelier, for example, is linked with Cancer and described as a "hopeless romantic." Six more characters, at the core of the story being narrated, embody planets. Emery and Anna — sun and moon — are the titular luminaries.

Catton has also placed her novel within an elaborate frame comprised of twelve successively shorter parts, with each part having one less chapter. The first part includes 12 chapters and 360 pages — suggesting that, together, the dozen men gathered around Moody form an all-encompassing circle. The twelfth part — one chapter long — is just two pages.

There's a postmodern wink in all of this: for all the language and characters in the impeccably paced and executed opening section, there's ultimately more truth to be found in the novel's moving, closing coda.

As that long first section nears its end, Moody explains why it is necessarily incomplete, noting how difficult it is for any man to reach beyond his own perspective — and how hard it therefore remains for separate perspectives, even when tallied together, to add up to the entire truth.

Catton's introductory sketches of each man — masterfully drawn with the incisive and intelligent strokes one associates with one of Eliot's omniscient, fiercely moral narrators — expand on Moody's insight.

One of them, she tells us, routinely eliminates all conflict "between reality as he wished to perceive it, and reality as it was otherwise perceived." Another "possessed a deeply private arrogance, a bedrock of self-certainty that needed neither proof nor explication." A third "tended to favor whichever proofs best pleased his sense of principle."

By bringing these men together — and using their distinct, astrologically coded personalities to illustrate the necessary limitations to their individualized points of view — Catton underscores all that divides her characters. Race, class and gender. Family, culture and education. Addiction, passion and greed.

But having posed this problem, Catton sets out to solve it. Insistently drawing characters into relation, the very existence of this novel suggests the insight we gain and how we might be changed by interacting with those around us. We become more fully ourselves, Catton intimates, by coming to see how blinkered we are when alone, and how much we need others to complete us.

In interviews, Catton has pointed to Martin Buber's "I and Thou" as a key philosophical influence in shaping this vision. But Buber himself was indebted to Ludwig Feuerbach, who was translated into English by one Marian Evans — and immortalized in English literature by George Eliot, Evans' nom de plume.

As Catton's luminaries, Anna and especially Emery — think Will Ladislaw — have a great deal in common with Eliot's protagonists. Emery is memorably described as "feeling both halved and doubled" by Anna — "or, in other words, doubled when in her presence, and halved when out of it." "Solitude," Emery says elsewhere, "is a condition best enjoyed in company."

Emery could be describing why we read, which brings us to a fuller understanding of ourselves through the lives unfolding before us. Call me Victorian for saying so, but Catton's supremely entertaining novel is a stirring reminder that what we were told when young really is true: Reading can make us better people.