The Luminaries

By: Eleanor Catton

Narrated by: Mark Meadows

Length: 29 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

Longlisted – Baileys Women’s Prize 2014

Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2013

Canadian Governor General's Literary Award, 2013.

It is 1866 and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.

The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction. Written in pitch-perfect historical register, richly evoking a mid-19th-century world of shipping and banking and goldrush boom and bust, it is also a ghost story, and a gripping mystery. It is a thrilling achievement for someone still in her mid-20s, and will confirm for critics and listeners that Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international writing firmament.

Eleanor Catton was born in 1985 in Canada and raised in New Zealand. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2007 and won the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for The Rehearsal. She was the recipient of the 2008 Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship to study for a year at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop in the US and went on to hold a position as Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing there, teaching Creative Writing and Popular Culture. Eleanor won a 2010 New Generation Award. She now lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

©2013 Eleanor Catton (P)2013 Audible Ltd

Critic reviews

"The Luminaries is an impressive novel, captivating, intense and full of surprises." (Times Literary Supplement)

"The Luminaries is a breathtakingly ambitious 800-page mystery with a plot as complex and a cast as motley as any 19th-century doorstopper. That Catton's absorbing, hugely elaborate novel is at its heart so simple is a great part of its charm. Catton's playful and increasingly virtuosic denouement arrives at a conclusion that is as beautiful as it is triumphant." (Daily Mail)

"It is awesomely - even bewilderingly - intricate. There's an immaculate finish to Catton's prose, which is no mean feat in a novel that lives or dies by its handling of period dialogue. It's more than 800 pages long but the reward for your stamina is a double-dealing world of skullduggery traced in rare complexity. Those Booker judges will have wrists of steel if it makes the shortlist, as it fully deserves." (Evening Standard)

A dizzying, heady masterpiece.

Listening to The Luminaries is like being dropped in the midst of New Zealand’s Otago Gold Rush, blindfolded and totally without reference, and then being spun round in circles by a stranger and let loose to feel around the landscapes and stand near their inhabitants, prospectors and bankers and Chinese diggers and tattooed Māori streaming around you, the women left to pleasure and care for these teeming throngs of men nearly knocking you over as they rush this way and that, and just as you feel overwhelming lost amidst these endless characters, totally without equilibrium in this many-plotted story centered in a town where everyone wants to make it rich, Eleanor Catton comes and takes you by the shoulder and steadies you for just a moment, and you breathe in the smells of dirty men and sea water as ships wreck upon the beach and scavengers look upon the ships and you sigh and know that despite there being too much information here, maybe just too much life here, for one book to ever express, you must keep reading.

Anyone coming off of a Goldfinch buzz and wondering what their next ambitious, too-long book will be should look no further than The Luminaries. Both books are written with the crisp observations that make them so much more than plot recounted. These are stories of life, magnified. Stories of how life could be if we all drunk in details of each other’s quirks and charms, every insecurity and affect, every ugly part and every beautiful one, and then maximized them into sentence-formed still lives spilling over into paragraphs so illustrative of this human condition we’re stuck in they act like paintings on pages changing ordinary days into phenomenas, ordinary interactions into humorous, tragic, wonderful things worth documenting. This is how these books get to be close to 1,000 pages long–life magnified is a very big thing, indeed.

The Luminaries, as I’ve mentioned, is the story of New Zealand’s Otago Gold Rush, and the story of a plethora of characters drawn together by an unfortunate set of circumstances. Men in all sorts of businesses centered around profiting off of gold or the men who find it feel uneasily bamboozled, they all sense a caper of some sort, and yet trying to pin down who has down wrong when is like trying to sift the gold dust apart from the dirt. The plot is complicated, and meant to be, as that’s the fun and beauty of the thing. Also, this is a book that uses the word “whore” quite a bit. Prepare yourself for that.

Catton includes all sorts of bells and whistles, but she really didn’t need to, as her writing stands on its own. There are astrological signs and charts of each character’s place on the zodiac, and there are chapter lengths that get progressively shorter by half until it seems almost hard to keep up with all the pieces that are being put together. Unfortunately much of this is lost in the audiobook, as it could have included a .pdf with the illustrations from the book for reference. What the audiobook version gained was narrator Mark Meadows deftly juggling the varied accents required amidst the cultural mish-mash of gold rush New Zealand. I appreciate getting lost in layers of meaning as much as the next book nerd, however, and I’ll be picking up a hard copy of the book to read again for further understanding of the whole astrological subtext.

No Illumination for me

So disappointed about this one, another Booker Prize winner that is not for me. I was frustrated because the writing seemed to not be as tight as it should have been. Yet, the author clearly knew what she was doing. What gives? Well I looked at the reviews and information on it -- another gimmick. Each chapter half the length of the other? Not for me. In the style of Wilkie Collin's (who was Dickens' best friend and who wrote The Woman in White, which I loved), well that is for me, but not with the gimmick. Why not just write a good book? Hopefully next time.

Luminous and Captivating

First, high praise to Mark Meadows for his excellent narration. He is stellar and immensely increased my enjoyment of this book.

Catton does a tremendous job of taking the reader/listener to the mid-1800's with the mannerisms and speech patterns of her characters. Because of this, it took me a bit to get my bearings, but thereafter I was enthralled.

I really loved this book until the closing scenes, which seemed anti-climatic. I am sad to say this, because it is a masterful book and I wanted to put it on my list of forever favorites right up until that last chapter. That is not to say it totally ruined the book for me, but it the ending was very mundane--just a wispy re-cap of what the reader (mostly) already knew.

Enthralling!

I never wanted it to end. The story gripped me from the very start, the author is a gifted writer and story-teller, and the narrator gives a virtuoso performance.

Really got into this

What made the experience of listening to The Luminaries the most enjoyable?

So jealous of Catton's talent! It took me a while to get into this book. I sometimes have trouble with male narrators. I bought the book version and may read it again, there's so much to capture. I mean, she's no Henry James or Jane Austen, but this book is pretty brilliant. Enjoy! (The ending will really get you and you'll have to go back and relisten!)

Couldn't get into the story

I wouldn't say, it's a stupid story but in my opinion it's not apt for an audiobook. Usually after at most 1-2 hours of listening to a story, I get drawn into it and can't wait to get back to it. In this case I listened on and on for hours on end until I finally decided to resign - which I have only done once before. I just couldn't cope any longer! So boring! Such a rigmarole! I really do enjoy lenghty descriptions and dialogues when they are well written, but this was just unbearable. Sorry! It is just as well that I didn't waste a credit for this book but bought it as a bargain for $ 4,95. Otherwise I would have been really disappointed!

Dickensian tale wonderfully read

This book requires a commitment of time and attention, but these are well rewarded.

The writer takes her leisurely time, and if you do too you will develop a cinematic picture of life on the gold fields in New Zealand. Moving back and forth in time, the story unravels and knits back up, each time with a few more pieces in place. I am ALMOST tempted to begin again from the beginning just to enjoy how deftly the author does it.

The book is amazingly read. Each character is given his or her own voice, so there is no doubt about who is speaking. If I have any quibble at all it is that a bit of the comic timing could have been improved. That said, I'd gladly spend more time with this reader.

Perfection

If you could sum up The Luminaries in three words, what would they be?

An engrossing mystery

What did you like best about this story?

This story unfolds so naturally becoming clearer and more complex all the while: It's meticulously crafted.

What about Mark Meadows’s performance did you like?

Meadows is truly brilliant and I was especially impressed how nimble he is jumping between characters.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

A Chinaman, a Scotsman, a land baron, a journalist, a mystic, a chemist, a politician, an opium-fuelled prostitute and a dead body: You figure it out.

Outstanding Reading

Would you consider the audio edition of The Luminaries to be better than the print version?

Yes--the variety of voices and accents made the book even more interesting and less difficult to follow.

Have you listened to any of Mark Meadows’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No, but will search for him.

Any additional comments?

If there is an academy award for audible books, then Mark Meadows should get one for this.

Ham-fisted, but brilliantly read

So, it is a bit difficult to review this book. For one, I came into it wanting to like it a lot, for another i l came into it expecting that I would not. This means there is likely some confirmation bias in my opinion.

My main gripe with the story itself is that as a reader, I only grow to know the characters by what the narrator tells me, rather than by what the characters do. This is not entirely accurate, but to a very large extent, every single somewhat artificial tete-a-tete event (which is the main device the plot advances by) is followed by the narrator laying out and analysing the internal state of either one or both the people that just interacted. In general, I am not a fan of "he thought /she thought" narration, in part because thoughts are often not quite that salient. That's neither here nor there; my opinion is that The Luminaries has so many characters that it deprives me of getting to know them myself. I rely on the narrator knowing them, and just explaining who they are.

The story as such is a pretty good mystery (who dunnit, as another reviewer has put it), and for the first few hours, aside from my gripe with the narrator, the story grew in a very satisfying manner.

I certainly do not regret having spent the time on the book, by no means. But I tend to disagree with some of the praise given the work. Although it is quite a feat, of the author, to publish this novel at only 28.