Book Review 2020 #1 - Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Published by: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: August 24th, 2013
Format: Kindle, 832 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy
One night three odd things happen in Hokitika. Crosbie Wells, an ex-prospector hoping to build a lumber mill dies. Anna Wetherell, a popular prostitute in the Chinatown district and known opium addict is found unconscious on the road out of town and is taken to prison. And Emery Staines, a wealthy prospector, disappears. After that night surprising discoveries start to link these events. Crosbie Wells had a fortune in gold hidden about his cabin. Emery Staines was about to pay Anna Wetherell a substantial amount of money before he disappeared. Enough to get her off the game. As for Anna Wetherell, she wakes in prison no longer an opium addict and her clothes are weighted down with gold in all the seams. What does it all mean? Obviously gold is the lifeblood of Hokitika, the epicenter of the West Coast Gold Rush, but how could these specific individuals account for their windfalls? Twelve of the townsmen peripherally or directly involved in these events have formed a council of sorts to get to the bottom of things. At the night of their first meeting at the Crown Hotel they are interrupted by a newcomer, Walter Moody. Walter is taken aback by the incongruous gathering. After hearing about Walter's otherworldly journey to Hokitika aboard Francis Carver's ship, Godspeed, the twelve decide to let him into their counsel and tell him their stories, one at a time. Each story filling in gaps of knowledge for the others. A picture begins to emerge and one man appears to be at the center of it, Francis Carver. As their counsel draws to a close news arrives that the Godspeed has foundered on the spare. She is wrecked. Who knows what the contents of that ship might reveal? Or what the arrival of Crosbie Wells's widow will mean. No one knew he was married. Yet here she is arriving to claim her inheritance, arriving before she could have gotten news of his untimely passing or the windfall in his cabin. Whatever secrets lay in Hokitika, Walter and the council feel duty bound to get the the bottom of it, no matter what happens.
There is literally no other book out there where it's so apt that I can literally say the stars fell perfectly into alignment to get me to pick it up. It all started at a book club meeting where one of my fellow members was talking about a doorstop of a book set in New Zealand that was notorious for it's excruciating detail of the minutiae of 1800s life. I instantly perked up, this sounded like my kind of book! After the meeting and the hellacious months that followed I didn't have a spare minute to look into it more until I stumbled on an article on the Radio Times website about a miniseries adaptation of The Luminaries. I instantly put two and two together and realized THIS was the book! I knew I had to read it. And that's when the final star fell into alignment, my library was promoting their digital collection on OverDrive and The Luminaries was there with no wait list! So on July 23rd I dove into a book that became my solace for the next month. This book is amazing for two reasons. One is that Eleanor Catton created a book entirely based around the zodiac with each of the twelve councilmen representing a sign of the zodiac. The other important characters are assigned heavenly bodies and they influence certain signs. Throughout the book there are meticulously plotted star charts that will drive the action that happens within the following pages. So this is a whole rabbit hole you can do a deep dive into if that's your jam, I waded in the shallow end and was mightily impressed. But what impressed me more is that while this amazing structure exists under the surface with charts and graphs and what have you, even with no knowledge of the zodiac this is an amazing book. This book can be read on two levels. Those who revel in astrology will see something entirely different than those who don't. So do not let the astrology deter you from picking it up! For me the astrology was another level of the onion, but I loved the onion even before I started peeling it. This was Deadwood meets Agatha Christie and everything else was just icing on the cake.
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