The Luminaries


The Luminaries is the longest book to ever win the Booker Prize (832 pages), by the youngest prizewinner (Eleanor Catton will be 29 this year). My parents cruelly gifted me a hardback copy, which has been ever harder to read than if I’d had it on my Kindle. Today, gripped by a five-pint hangover, I read the last 300-odd pages in a Stakhanovite burst of productivity.

As I’ve said previously, it’s a hard book to get started on. There’s a huge cast, and although the omniscient narrator write beautifully, the individual characters don’t have voices that clearly differentiate them. The first section is made up of two characters discussing the actions of a third, in most every permutation of the twelve men in the Crown Hotel, and when this 360 page section draws to a close, Catton summarises it in about four pages, leaving you wondering why you went through all there was before.

It wasn’t until after I finished reading the book and read the acknowledgments, with reference to the Golden Ratio, that I realized the ever-shrinking section level conformed to a particular purpose. I’ve read a review claiming that each section’s word count is half that of the section preceding it, which I’m skeptical of, partly because the Golden Ratio isn’t 2:1, and partly because I don’t believe anyone has counted all the words. Fitting to a structure like this is a little distracting for me as a reader; the description of the events in each chapter gets longer as the chapters shrink, until the final chapter has a 234 word description, and only 95 words in the chapter itself, which feels more like a literary joke than literature.

However, the defects of the book – a reliance on coincidence, suspension of disbelief and prioritizing the beauty of each sentence over a coherent and compelling narrative – don’t stop it from being an enjoyable read and a great work. Whether it rewards rereading, I’m not sure: I’d quite like to read the first part again, now I understand better the significance of all the things the characters do, but that is a further 360 page commitment. That’s a lot of time, and a lot of strain for my back.

So if you like finely wrought prose, or Victorian style novels (it’s redolent of Dickens, or Conan Doyle, at different times) and you’re happy that not every loose end will be tied up, I think you’d enjoy this. If you don’t have a medium-intensity hangover planned foe the near future, you might never get to finish it.

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