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meghancolbert's review against another edition
The plot was intriguing, albeit very slow. My main issue with this book is the author’s decision to censor the word “damn” but not the racial and misogynistic slurs. I got tired of reading the word wh*** over and over again instead of the woman’s actual name. Don’t come at me with “well that’s just how it was back then” because not every historical detail needs to be included in a book that was published in 2013. The male characters are multi-dimensional and nuanced, whereas the female characters are only portrayed in the most derogatory and unflattering manner. I expect better from 21st century authors.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Misogyny, Racial slurs, and Suicide
maura_kathleen's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Two weeks ago, I was visiting a bookstore on the opposite end of the city to find a particular Christmas present for my brother-in-law when I chanced to glimpse The Luminaries on display. It stood out to me for its 2013 Man Booker prize endorsement and also for its author's name, which rang a bell, although I couldn't place it immediately. Not until I caught that it was set in New Zealand did I remember why the author's name was familiar. On a tip from The New Yorker I had read – devoured, really – Birnam Wood upon its release earlier this year. Maybe the award date had stalled me from making the connection, because I understood Eleanor Catton to be a relatively young author when I read Birnam Wood, and I guess I was right to find that startling, because Catton won the Booker for The Luminaries when she was only 28 or so. (Incidentally, my age now.) Still, other than the New Zealand connection, I also might not have guessed the two books, by synopsis, to be from the same writer; the plot of Birnam Wood is deeply and resonantly contemporary, and that of The Luminaries is decidedly not. By faith in the author alone, I wanted to buy it then and there, but I was already pretty overtaxed on Christmas presents from both a finance perspective and an I-have-to-carry-this-all-back-across-the-city perspective, and so I decided to place a hold for an e-book on Libby. Two days ago, returned from holiday travels and roughly 70% of the way through the book, I went to my local bookstore and purchased it anyway. A book that had engrossed me this fully seemed to deserve it. I wanted to hold it in my hands.
I feel very lucky to have read both The Luminaries and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in the same year -- two utterly fine approximations of 19th-century stylings by authors with wonderful range and masterful craft. Historical fiction, including its speculative variants, is one of my favorite genres, and books like these (or Wolf Hall, from a few years back) spoil me with their immersive texture. I also quite like mysteries and other suspense-based tales, though I don't often read them. (Outside of indulging my semi-guilty pleasure in Kate Morton.) I've sometimes found that mysteries can lack body in novels -- either the central mystery is too thin to fully thrust the story forward, or there's too little beyond the mystery to make me care, and the vibes are too police-procedural, in essence. But The Luminaries used its 800-some pages so compellingly to thread a complicated mystery inextricable from the characters who made it happen and who stumbled variously in piecing it all together. I couldn't put it down. I fathomed dozens of potential solutions along the way but generally felt like I was only cottoning on to the right one about where the narrative wanted me to, and by the end, there were really only one or two small points out of the many interlocking pieces of this puzzle that remained just slightly too vague. (The very last "in which" clarifies that Carver, following up on the groundwork from Dunedin, was the one to bring the laudanum to Wells' cottage; was he also the one who bought it from Pritchard? I can't remember the original source. Furthermore, the path of the gold is charted in great detail throughout the novel, except the point where it goes from being buried by Emery Staines somewhere in the Arahura to existing inside the newly deceased Crosbie's cottage -- a delicious irony, it finally getting back to him -- and I presume, also from the last "in which", that Carver was also the one who placed it there -- it says he "comes upon the excavated fortune" -- but was he also the one who excavated it? If he didn't, how did he find it? On a tip from someone? Maybe Tauwhare, although I don't know if he knew where it was? His cards stayed closer to his chest than many other characters. I'm not sure it matters much how he found it if the point is that he just did; it's obvious why he would want it to end up in the cottage, for the purpose of being inherited by Lydia. I just can't determine whether I missed something if someone else had dug it up. Staines, in preparation to give half of it to Anna? ) I'd consider it the most addictive mystery I've encountered since I watched the anime adaptation of Urasawa's Monster this fall and the most suspenseful story I've read since either Birnam Wood or Susanna Clarke's other masterpiece, Piranesi, last year. (Not that Strange & Norrell wasn't also delightfully hook-y in many ways, but I think it depends less on sheer intrigue.)
Rich prose made the homeward-bounder gold-rush town of Hokitika and its inhabitants so vivid. I like the "uneasy alliance" dynamic between the Crown twelve quite a lot. It was in Catton's profiles of each member that I most saw in her the writer who would eventually create Birnam Wood; she does well with narrating (sometimes quite archly) a character's sense of self to himself and to us -- his idiosyncrasies and irrationalities and hypocrisies, with great particularity. My highlights for this book are an utter mess because instead of reserving them, as I usually do with e-books, to passages that strike me for the purpose of prose, characterization, or theme, I started using them eventually to also flag items that seemed pertinent to solving the various mysteries. But let's take, for example, this passage from the introduction of the pastor:
"Cowell Devlin was, to all intents and purposes, a self-made man--but because this epithet is rarely used to describe members of the holy orders, we ought to clarify its usage here. The cleric spent the present moment in a state of constant visualization, conjuring in his mind the untroubled future self he had determined that he would one day become. His theology, too, followed this pattern: he was a hopeful believer, and to his many disciples he spoke of a utopian future, a world without want. When he spoke, he freely interchanged the language of auspice with the language of dreams: there was no conflict, in Cowell Devlin's mind, between reality as he wished to perceive it, and reality as it was otherwise perceived. Such an inclination might, in the context of another man's temperament, be called ambition, but Devlin's self-image was impregnable, even mythic, and he had long ago determined that he was not an ambitious man. As might be expected, he was given to bouts of very purposeful ignorance, and tended to pass over the harsher truths of human nature in favor of those that could be romanticized by whimsy and imagination. With respect to these latter articles, Devlin was an adept. He was an excellent storyteller, and therefore, an effective clergyman. His faith, like his self-image, was complete, equable, and almost clairvoyant in its expression--attributes that, as Balfour had already observed, occasionally made him seem rather smug." (The Luminaries, 87-88)
What a thorough picture, and what a chuckle of a close. But it so brought to mind much of Catton's character-work from Birnam Wood, especially in the introductory elements that dominate the first fifty or so pages. Now I feel I have to pull an example of a similar maneuver from there, where she with such care teases out a trait's angles and implications... fetching my copy... rifling through... this will do:
"Sir Owen Darvish had never felt more acutely conscious of his nationality than he did when he was with Lemoine, and in the brief time that he had known the billionaire he had experienced two quite different forms of patriotic feeling. He was intensely proud of their association, and felt he had fulfilled a lofty duty to his country, not just in having courted foreign wealth, but in proving--in being proof--that New Zealanders could hold their own among the world's elite; to have secured not just Lemoine's business, but also his approval and his respect was, in Sir Owen's mind, a matter of high national service, and in fond moments, he expressed deep gratitude towards himself from an imagined common point of view. At the same time, however, he wanted desperately to see the man cut down to size--and in this, he felt even more acutely Kiwi. He was long accustomed to regarding his country as an automatic underdog, as a righteous, plucky, decent, and fundamentally good-natured contender, unfairly disadvantaged, in any instance of unflattering international comparison, by its small population, its short history, and its geographical remoteness from the great power centres of the world. A habit of defensive self-exception masked a deep fear of his nation's insignificance, and a deep anxiety that at the end of the day, poetic justice might not in fact be served, and although this was largely a subconscious attitude, he did register in himself a genuine discomfort whenever New Zealand was held to any international standard that afforded no handicap for scale. All of this lent itself quite naturally to an anti-American sentiment; and as he could not help but view Lemoine's colossal wealth and confidence in metonymic terms, he'd felt, ever since he'd met the man, an almost moral longing to defeat him. When he and Jill were alone, they often spoke about the billionaire in tones that bordered on contempt--a contempt made all the more bitter by the knowledge that Lemoine probably never spoke of them to anyone at all." (Birnam Wood, 136-137)
In Birnam Wood, Catton goes further to ground basically everything that goes wrong, plot-wise, in her characters' particular preoccupations, illusions, etc. That's not quite her project in The Luminaries, where she is working with a doubly or trebly large cast and trying something singular, structurally. (I might as well note here, as an aside, that I have little knowledge of astrology beyond basic familiarity with the western versus Chinese zodiac and remember roughly which personality traits were attributed to which in The Sims 2, lol, and therefore I am unable to critique her execution on that front, though I respect it as an experimental grounding framework for character development and motivation as well as story-telling structure. After finishing the novel, I read that Catton had modeled the parts structure of the novel on a waning moon, and that I think she pulled off brilliantly... what a lovely dark moon of an ending.) That's not to say that The Luminaries wasn't also strongly motivated by its characters' self-concept. This was most obvious to me in moments where characters made what could be considered unforced errors that were convenient for moving the plot along -- certain indiscretions by Balfour and Nilssen in the February part, for example, come to mind as choices that could strain credulity, if Catton weren't right to call fiction's bluff by pointing out that people do every day act on similarly questionable impulses and judgment calls deriving, as her characters' do, from their temperaments, conditions, and psychological habits. I also think that to critique the novel over... for lack of a better word, the relevance of portions of the cast (specifically, the twelve at the Crown, give or take Moody) to the novel's unwinding is both missing the point and beside the point. Missing the point because it is, in part, Catton's design that these men should contribute consequentially, as a collective, to the plot but remain somewhat ancillary to it; she is interested in how heavenly bodies are impacted by proximity to each other, and some are more distant; but it seems a satisfying representation, too, of any earthly plot, where no event is truly isolated in cause or consequence. And beside the point because, like, the majority of the book, by estimation, is devoted to them and their histories and their choices. A book is not just its outcome; a mystery is not just its resolution. Within the mystery/plot, the men at the Crown are by turns suspects, witnesses, and detectives, among other roles, lighting the periphery while the deeds of the main actors are gradually illuminated. I loved this choice. I think it was one of the reasons the mystery felt so wonderfully dense and the world of the novel so alive.
The planetary bodies, so to speak, were also well-realized. Carver I perhaps found the least interesting among them, although he was a sufficiently intimidating presence, and his characterization gained helpful texture throughhis shared history with Sook . I encountered one vague spoiler early on as pertains to Anna Wetherell; namely, a google search of the novel's title revealed to me that in the miniseries adaptation, she is the central character. I already trusted that Catton's work in introducing Anna vis-a-vis the perception of various men was extremely deliberate and that I should expect her to be, in consequential part, something other than she was perceived or dictated to be by people who could not entirely know her beyond their own biases or through their own limitations -- at the very least, full of her own nuance and interiority -- but this spoiler confirmed for me that I should be paying a lot of attention to her . I've gone on for a very long time already in this review, so as for the rest of them, I'll suffice to say that the albatross sequence was lovely and was very effective at, in just a few strokes, investing me quite a lot in the pairing that is the pulsing core at the center of the celestial grid: Emery and Anna, young and bright and bound together, opposite ends of the same pendulum of fortune until they are at last able to find the equilibrium of the middle. I did not mind the fantastical swerve that answered for some of the plot mysteries that had never left my mind, e.g. the disproportionate effect of the opium and the vanished bullet. It was about the time that Anna started looking starving around the time of the seance that I guessed at what might be happening, and that wasn't long before she signed his name and started making more direct insinuations to Devlin. I might not have guessed it at all if I wasn't such a big fan of Fullmetal Alchemist, which meant that her growing thinness, especially once she clarified that she had been eating and was not merely being abused by Lydia, put me straightaway in mind of Ed sustaining Al while the latter's body was stuck at the doors of Truth. Perhaps I forgive this device, whatever its thematic integralarity, all the more for reminding me of FMA.
I'd also like to say just briefly that I also respect how the novel handles its other thematic interests, particularly those involving a kind of nation-building that takes place on the frontier. How colonial ambition and opportunism undergirds and corrupts it; how status there is upset by vicissitudes of fortune (gold mining really does mesh so nicely with Catton's astrological interest); how promise fails to apply equally to all comers; how the moment of begetting a new structure can both correct or further agonize disenfranchisement, especially where minorities lack their own sufficient communities with which to support each other; and how the law, criminal or contract, can stymy the lot of those it cannot understand and does not adequately represent, either through mere misapprehension or through directly predatory conduct, plus sexism and racism. I'm still pretty upset overAh Sook, and would like to reflect more on the relationship between his death, when Shepard takes justice into his own hands and executes Sook in the same moment that Sook is trying to enact revenge on Carver, and the philosophy of digger's law, etc. that he outlines to Nilssen earlier in the book, as well as on how the novel judges this conduct. It does not, to me, in the fullest context, look like justice.
An excellent read. Suspenseful, humorous, thought-provoking, meticulous, generous. What a way to close the year.
(Rating-wise, this is currently in spitting-distance of a five-star for me, and maybe I'll move it there, if I ever get around to re-evaluating some of my list. I liked the waning moon structure, but I felt myself wishing that there was a bit more closure in the cards for certain threads and characters. But on the basis of what this is and not what it is not, I think it is extremely satisfying and so totally up my alley. Its probably in my top five reads of the year, and if it's not, that's only because my reading habits are light enough that I mostly only read very good books. Right now I'm feeling that it probably ekes its way in, alongside, in no particular order, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Demon Copperhead, Howards End, and War and Peace... which I mostly read in 2022, to be honest, before finishing it in 2023. The replacement slot would probably go to Pachinko, which I was very glued to and had such a strong emotional reaction to... but if I were to extend to ten, the competition would get very fierce.)
I feel very lucky to have read both The Luminaries and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in the same year -- two utterly fine approximations of 19th-century stylings by authors with wonderful range and masterful craft. Historical fiction, including its speculative variants, is one of my favorite genres, and books like these (or Wolf Hall, from a few years back) spoil me with their immersive texture. I also quite like mysteries and other suspense-based tales, though I don't often read them. (Outside of indulging my semi-guilty pleasure in Kate Morton.) I've sometimes found that mysteries can lack body in novels -- either the central mystery is too thin to fully thrust the story forward, or there's too little beyond the mystery to make me care, and the vibes are too police-procedural, in essence. But The Luminaries used its 800-some pages so compellingly to thread a complicated mystery inextricable from the characters who made it happen and who stumbled variously in piecing it all together. I couldn't put it down. I fathomed dozens of potential solutions along the way but generally felt like I was only cottoning on to the right one about where the narrative wanted me to, and by the end, there were really only one or two small points out of the many interlocking pieces of this puzzle that remained just slightly too vague. (
Rich prose made the homeward-bounder gold-rush town of Hokitika and its inhabitants so vivid. I like the "uneasy alliance" dynamic between the Crown twelve quite a lot. It was in Catton's profiles of each member that I most saw in her the writer who would eventually create Birnam Wood; she does well with narrating (sometimes quite archly) a character's sense of self to himself and to us -- his idiosyncrasies and irrationalities and hypocrisies, with great particularity. My highlights for this book are an utter mess because instead of reserving them, as I usually do with e-books, to passages that strike me for the purpose of prose, characterization, or theme, I started using them eventually to also flag items that seemed pertinent to solving the various mysteries. But let's take, for example, this passage from the introduction of the pastor:
"Cowell Devlin was, to all intents and purposes, a self-made man--but because this epithet is rarely used to describe members of the holy orders, we ought to clarify its usage here. The cleric spent the present moment in a state of constant visualization, conjuring in his mind the untroubled future self he had determined that he would one day become. His theology, too, followed this pattern: he was a hopeful believer, and to his many disciples he spoke of a utopian future, a world without want. When he spoke, he freely interchanged the language of auspice with the language of dreams: there was no conflict, in Cowell Devlin's mind, between reality as he wished to perceive it, and reality as it was otherwise perceived. Such an inclination might, in the context of another man's temperament, be called ambition, but Devlin's self-image was impregnable, even mythic, and he had long ago determined that he was not an ambitious man. As might be expected, he was given to bouts of very purposeful ignorance, and tended to pass over the harsher truths of human nature in favor of those that could be romanticized by whimsy and imagination. With respect to these latter articles, Devlin was an adept. He was an excellent storyteller, and therefore, an effective clergyman. His faith, like his self-image, was complete, equable, and almost clairvoyant in its expression--attributes that, as Balfour had already observed, occasionally made him seem rather smug." (The Luminaries, 87-88)
What a thorough picture, and what a chuckle of a close. But it so brought to mind much of Catton's character-work from Birnam Wood, especially in the introductory elements that dominate the first fifty or so pages. Now I feel I have to pull an example of a similar maneuver from there, where she with such care teases out a trait's angles and implications... fetching my copy... rifling through... this will do:
"Sir Owen Darvish had never felt more acutely conscious of his nationality than he did when he was with Lemoine, and in the brief time that he had known the billionaire he had experienced two quite different forms of patriotic feeling. He was intensely proud of their association, and felt he had fulfilled a lofty duty to his country, not just in having courted foreign wealth, but in proving--in being proof--that New Zealanders could hold their own among the world's elite; to have secured not just Lemoine's business, but also his approval and his respect was, in Sir Owen's mind, a matter of high national service, and in fond moments, he expressed deep gratitude towards himself from an imagined common point of view. At the same time, however, he wanted desperately to see the man cut down to size--and in this, he felt even more acutely Kiwi. He was long accustomed to regarding his country as an automatic underdog, as a righteous, plucky, decent, and fundamentally good-natured contender, unfairly disadvantaged, in any instance of unflattering international comparison, by its small population, its short history, and its geographical remoteness from the great power centres of the world. A habit of defensive self-exception masked a deep fear of his nation's insignificance, and a deep anxiety that at the end of the day, poetic justice might not in fact be served, and although this was largely a subconscious attitude, he did register in himself a genuine discomfort whenever New Zealand was held to any international standard that afforded no handicap for scale. All of this lent itself quite naturally to an anti-American sentiment; and as he could not help but view Lemoine's colossal wealth and confidence in metonymic terms, he'd felt, ever since he'd met the man, an almost moral longing to defeat him. When he and Jill were alone, they often spoke about the billionaire in tones that bordered on contempt--a contempt made all the more bitter by the knowledge that Lemoine probably never spoke of them to anyone at all." (Birnam Wood, 136-137)
In Birnam Wood, Catton goes further to ground basically everything that goes wrong, plot-wise, in her characters' particular preoccupations, illusions, etc. That's not quite her project in The Luminaries, where she is working with a doubly or trebly large cast and trying something singular, structurally. (I might as well note here, as an aside, that I have little knowledge of astrology beyond basic familiarity with the western versus Chinese zodiac and remember roughly which personality traits were attributed to which in The Sims 2, lol, and therefore I am unable to critique her execution on that front, though I respect it as an experimental grounding framework for character development and motivation as well as story-telling structure. After finishing the novel, I read that Catton had modeled the parts structure of the novel on a waning moon, and that I think she pulled off brilliantly... what a lovely dark moon of an ending.) That's not to say that The Luminaries wasn't also strongly motivated by its characters' self-concept. This was most obvious to me in moments where characters made what could be considered unforced errors that were convenient for moving the plot along -- certain indiscretions by Balfour and Nilssen in the February part, for example, come to mind as choices that could strain credulity, if Catton weren't right to call fiction's bluff by pointing out that people do every day act on similarly questionable impulses and judgment calls deriving, as her characters' do, from their temperaments, conditions, and psychological habits. I also think that to critique the novel over... for lack of a better word, the relevance of portions of the cast (specifically, the twelve at the Crown, give or take Moody) to the novel's unwinding is both missing the point and beside the point. Missing the point because it is, in part, Catton's design that these men should contribute consequentially, as a collective, to the plot but remain somewhat ancillary to it; she is interested in how heavenly bodies are impacted by proximity to each other, and some are more distant; but it seems a satisfying representation, too, of any earthly plot, where no event is truly isolated in cause or consequence. And beside the point because, like, the majority of the book, by estimation, is devoted to them and their histories and their choices. A book is not just its outcome; a mystery is not just its resolution. Within the mystery/plot, the men at the Crown are by turns suspects, witnesses, and detectives, among other roles, lighting the periphery while the deeds of the main actors are gradually illuminated. I loved this choice. I think it was one of the reasons the mystery felt so wonderfully dense and the world of the novel so alive.
The planetary bodies, so to speak, were also well-realized. Carver I perhaps found the least interesting among them, although he was a sufficiently intimidating presence, and his characterization gained helpful texture through
I'd also like to say just briefly that I also respect how the novel handles its other thematic interests, particularly those involving a kind of nation-building that takes place on the frontier. How colonial ambition and opportunism undergirds and corrupts it; how status there is upset by vicissitudes of fortune (gold mining really does mesh so nicely with Catton's astrological interest); how promise fails to apply equally to all comers; how the moment of begetting a new structure can both correct or further agonize disenfranchisement, especially where minorities lack their own sufficient communities with which to support each other; and how the law, criminal or contract, can stymy the lot of those it cannot understand and does not adequately represent, either through mere misapprehension or through directly predatory conduct, plus sexism and racism. I'm still pretty upset over
An excellent read. Suspenseful, humorous, thought-provoking, meticulous, generous. What a way to close the year.
(Rating-wise, this is currently in spitting-distance of a five-star for me, and maybe I'll move it there, if I ever get around to re-evaluating some of my list. I liked the waning moon structure, but I felt myself wishing that there was a bit more closure in the cards for certain threads and characters. But on the basis of what this is and not what it is not, I think it is extremely satisfying and so totally up my alley. Its probably in my top five reads of the year, and if it's not, that's only because my reading habits are light enough that I mostly only read very good books. Right now I'm feeling that it probably ekes its way in, alongside, in no particular order, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Demon Copperhead, Howards End, and War and Peace... which I mostly read in 2022, to be honest, before finishing it in 2023. The replacement slot would probably go to Pachinko, which I was very glued to and had such a strong emotional reaction to... but if I were to extend to ten, the competition would get very fierce.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction
Moderate: Gun violence, Miscarriage, and Violence
Minor: Suicide, Antisemitism, Trafficking, and Colonisation
bill369's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
I read this book for The StoryGraph Reads the World 2022 challenge.
The characters were complex, gripping and overall perfect. Nevertheless, I didn't grow to like them. I was more interested in the plot than the characters.
Twists, illegitimate bastards, séances, past disputes and an immense amount of money missing. Contained. The plot is fabulous! I must acknowledge that it was hard getting into the book. Primarily because of the high number of characters and their detailed descriptions. However, once I remembered who each character was, I was hooked. The story has a tremendous quantity of details. I am firmly impressed by that.
Page 480, unrequited love.
„(...) Vykládali jsme nesmysly a já plácla nějakou hloupost o neopětované lásce. A on mne zastavil a řekl, že neopětovaná láska není možná; že to potom není láska. Prý, že lásku je třeba dávat achronologicaljímat, aby se dvě rovnocenné poloviny spojily v celek, v milenecký pár.“
I was hoping the book would end with chronilogical summary of the events yet it didn't. Thankfully, this summary exists online therefore I understood what I didn't understand.
I'm proud I managed to read this book and understand the more extensive portion of it since it wasn't an easy read. I'm glad I read it because it was a personal challenge.
The characters were complex, gripping and overall perfect. Nevertheless, I didn't grow to like them. I was more interested in the plot than the characters.
Twists, illegitimate bastards, séances, past disputes and an immense amount of money missing. Contained. The plot is fabulous! I must acknowledge that it was hard getting into the book. Primarily because of the high number of characters and their detailed descriptions. However, once I remembered who each character was, I was hooked. The story has a tremendous quantity of details. I am firmly impressed by that.
Page 480, unrequited love.
I was hoping the book would end with chronilogical summary of the events yet it didn't. Thankfully, this summary exists online therefore I understood what I didn't understand.
I'm proud I managed to read this book and understand the more extensive portion of it since it wasn't an easy read. I'm glad I read it because it was a personal challenge.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Gun violence, Racial slurs, Racism, and Trafficking
Moderate: Addiction, Miscarriage, Sexism, Violence, Pregnancy, and Toxic friendship
Minor: Drug use, Miscarriage, Sexual content, Suicide, Blood, Suicide attempt, Murder, Alcohol, and Classism