The Luminaries

The Structure

Before The Luminaries can be discussed as a novel, its architecture has to be understood, because the architecture is not decorative but constitutive — it is what the novel is doing, not just how it is organised. Catton designed the book according to astrological principles. The twelve men who gather in a Hokitika hotel to tell their story to Walter Moody correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac; seven other characters correspond to the seven celestial bodies of traditional astrology (sun, moon, and the five planets visible to the naked eye). Each character’s personality, role, and relationship to the others is determined by the astrological properties of their corresponding sign or body.

The sections halve in length as the novel progresses: the first section is roughly 360 pages, the second 180, then 90, 45, and so on down to sections of a few pages each. This halving enacts the astrological concept of waning — the sections move backward in chronological time as they decrease in length, which means the reader moves toward the novel’s beginning as the novel moves toward its end. By the final sections, which describe events from years before the hotel meeting, we are reading the very compressed origins of the very expanded story we began with.

Why do this? The structure makes an argument that plot summary cannot convey: that the events of the novel were determined in advance of themselves, that the characters were moving toward outcomes that their nature, in the astrological sense, made inevitable. The structure forces the reader to experience something like the perspective of an astrologer — seeing the chart, knowing in general terms how things will go, and watching the specifics unfold within that predetermined frame. Whether one believes in astrology is beside the point; Catton is using it as a formal system for thinking about fate and character, and the system produces reading effects that no other architecture could.

The Mystery

Arriving in Hokitika in January 1866, Walter Moody stumbles into a secret council of twelve men at the Crown Hotel, each of whom has been separately implicated in a set of interconnected mysteries: a hermit named Crosbie Wells has died alone in his cottage, apparently of drink; a large fortune in gold has been found concealed in his cottage and promptly disappeared; a young woman named Anna Wetherell has been found near death in the road, apparently from an overdose of laudanum; and a young man named Emery Staines, the most successful gold prospector on the Coast, has vanished without explanation on the same night all of this occurred.

The twelve men — a shipping agent, a hotelier, a banker, a politician, a lawyer, a chaplain, a goldsmith, a Chinese gold-buyer, and others — each know a piece of the story. Moody listens, and so does the reader, as the pieces are arranged and rearranged. Catton handles the mystery mechanics with complete assurance: the plot is intricately constructed and ultimately coherent, with none of the loose ends that often afflict formally ambitious novels. The Victorian genre conventions — the omniscient narrator’s dry asides, the chapter epigraphs from astrological texts, the language of the period rendered accurately enough to feel inhabited rather than imitated — are deployed with evident pleasure and total control.

The novel’s central characters — Anna, Emery, and the partially completed arc between them — are the emotional core around which the structural game rotates. Catton is careful to make them genuinely affecting, because without that emotional investment the architecture would be all there is. The story of Anna Wetherell, a whore and laudanum addict who turns out to be something considerably more than she appears, is one of the novel’s finest achievements: she is rendered from the outside, through other characters’ perceptions of her, and yet becomes entirely real.

Reading 832 Pages

The practical question that surrounds The Luminaries is what it is like to actually read it — whether the formal ambition pays out in experience or merely in admiration. The answer is that it pays out, but with a delay. The early sections are dense with character introduction and genre-establishing detail, and the pleasure of them is primarily the pleasure of Victorian-style storytelling: precise, unhurried, confident about the value of accumulated observation. The structural game is perceptible but not yet felt.

The experience changes as the sections shorten. The halving architecture accelerates the narrative in a way that feels — and this is the right word — cosmological: events that were presented at leisure earlier in the novel now flash past in a page, and the compression creates a sensation of inevitability, of watching the same events from a different angle at a different speed. By the time the reader reaches the final sections — brief, crystalline, describing events from years before — the entire novel is available in memory simultaneously, and the last pages produce an effect of resolution that would have been impossible to achieve by any conventional means.

This is what the best formally ambitious fiction does: it changes what the reader is capable of feeling by changing the form through which the feeling is delivered. The Luminaries takes 832 pages to produce an effect that could not be produced in fewer. Whether that is a recommendation or a warning depends on the reader, but it is the honest account of what Catton has built.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A formally extraordinary Booker winner that uses astrological architecture to build something no conventionally structured novel could: a mystery about fate that enacts its argument in its form.