Book Review: "The Luminaries" by Eleanor Catton

Yes, I know - I’m only reading “The Luminaries” by Eleanor Catton now. So where was I in 2013 when it was first released? Well, I was probably crying on my bedroom floor about how hard all my work was and having various nervous breakdowns. The last thing I needed was an almost 850 page novel on top of everything I was already reading and re-reading and analysing and preparing for. It was all a little bit touchy in that year and I hate to say it, but I knew that the novel existed well enough to know that it was probably not the best time to read it. After that, I was completely bogged down by everything else that “The Luminaries” fell into the black hole of the ‘to be read’ list and never really seemed to surface again. I am not going to lie to you, I have no real reason for that and I have even seen other people reading it over the course of my periods at university. Last week, I finally gave up and bought myself a copy, sitting down every morning with a cafetière of “Skull Crusher” coffee and began to read this intense, oversized and incredible novel. I was completely immersed in it every morning of that week.

Walter Moody has seen something on a ship. He meets a group of twelve other men who are each very important in their own way: Te Rau Tauwhare, Charlie Frost, Dick Mannering, Quee Long, Harald Nilssen, Thomas Balfour, Joseph Pritchard, Aubert Gascoigne, Sook Yongsheng, Cowell Devlin, Benjamin Lowenthal and Edgar Clinch. Each of these characters including Moody are the protagonists of the novel in their own way, each of them recount the events leading up to that dire day on the ship.

Filled with strange thefts, gold and false identities, this novel makes a point of how nothing is ever really what it seems. When mistaken identity begins to come to the surface, Walter Moody will find things out that he never even imagined.

From the perspective of people living in the 1800s, we get everything from stealing identities to stealing entire lives, from making amends to contacting the dead, from murders and mistresses to a man who receives the wrong suitcase - this book has everything you need for a perfect novel over the course of the chilly season. It is brilliant as it is dark and deep, deep like the ocean.

Incredible as it is long, it is definitely worth the reading time it takes - every single second of it. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but what I do want to tell you is this: do not make any kind of assumptions about any of the characters when you go in, because you need an open mind throughout in order to get the most out of the book.

Eleanor Catton seriously outdid post-modern fiction with this classic of our day mixing the Victorian maxims of the thriller and philosophical novel with the modernist thriller novel and finally the multiple protagonist idea of the post-modernist novel. I think that not only is this a perfect blend of past and present, but that this book really did deserve all the awards it won (and I rarely say that).

If you really came here for just my opinion then let me tell you this: reading this book is like holding your head underwater whilst trying to talk to the police on the phone, telling them you’ve been kidnapped by twelve angry men, each of whom is going to take your head out of the water just to tell you a story.