A 19th Century Murder Mystery Told Backwards by the Stars

Gold, ghosts, and a very complicated seance

Here’s the setup, and I’ll keep it clean because half the pleasure (such as it is) comes from the reveal. It’s 1866, Hokitika, New Zealand, a gold rush boomtown made of mud and ambition. A young man named Walter Moody arrives fresh off a ship and stumbles into a room where twelve local men have secretly gathered to compare notes on a set of overlapping mysteries: a wealthy prospector has vanished, a drunk hermit has died with an unexplained fortune in his cottage, and a prostitute named Anna Wetherell was found half dead in the street, stuffed full of opium, on the same night everything else went wrong.

That’s the hook. What Catton does with it is the whole show. Each of the twelve men holds one piece of the puzzle, and the book unfolds as this incredible mosaic where you get contradictory partial accounts of the same events from different angles, gradually assembling into something like the truth. It’s structured, and this is the famous gimmick, entirely around astrology. Each character corresponds to a star sign or a planet, the book’s twelve long parts mirror the waning of the moon (each part is roughly half the length of the one before), and there are actual star charts at the start of every section mapping the characters’ positions. I will be honest with you: I do not think this structural conceit does much for the reading experience in the moment. I don’t think you need to understand a lick of astrology to follow the plot. But knowing it’s there gives the whole book a hum of intention, like watching someone build a ship in a bottle. You may not need the ship to be in the bottle. But my god, look at that.

What actually works, and what made me want to throw it across the room

The plotting, once it gets going, is genuinely superb. Catton is doing something that looks effortless and is absolutely not: dozens of characters, a fortune in gold that keeps changing hands and meaning, forged documents, a corrupt shipping scheme, blackmail, opium addiction, at least two people faking their own deaths. By the末 (sorry, by the end) it clicks into place with the satisfaction of a Victorian sensation novel, which is exactly the tradition she’s writing in. Wilkie Collins would recognize this book immediately. So would anyone who loves the pleasure of a plot that rewards patience.

Here’s the thing though. The first three hundred pages are a slog. I want to be very clear about that because I think a lot of reviews soften it out of respect for the Booker committee. The opening section, where twelve men each tell Walter Moody their version of events in a smoky hotel parlor, is necessarily repetitive and necessarily slow, because it’s doing enormous structural work, and Catton knows exactly what she’s doing, and I still found myself checking how many pages were left in the chapter more than I want to admit. I remember being on a plane to Denver, stuck next to a guy who kept looking over at my book like he pitied me, and thinking: I get it, buddy. I get why you’re looking at me like that.

The characters are the other real problem, for me. Anna Wetherell, who should be the emotional center of the whole book, remains oddly opaque. We’re told she’s magnetic. We’re told men fall for her instantly and completely. But Catton keeps her at arm’s length, filtered through everyone else’s perception, and I never quite felt her as a person so much as a symbol other characters projected onto. Emery Staines, her supposed soulmate, is worse: pure cipher, defined entirely by being charming and absent. The zodiac scheme requires the characters to behave according to their signs rather than according to psychology, and you can feel the strings sometimes. Lydia Wells, the conwoman running the seance racket, is the one character who feels fully alive on the page, gleeful and dangerous and specific in a way I wanted more of everywhere else.

The tangent I have to include: this book made me go down an actual rabbit hole reading about the real Hokitika gold rush and the shipping wrecks off the West Coast of New Zealand, which turned out to be more compelling to me some nights than the novel itself. That’s not nothing. A book that sends you out into the world to learn things is doing something right even when it’s failing you on the page.

The Luminaries is a book more admired for its architecture than loved for its people, and I think Catton would probably take that as a compliment.

About Eleanor Catton

Catton was twenty-eight when The Luminaries won the Booker, which made her the youngest winner in the prize’s history at the time, and also the first New Zealander to win it for a book set in New Zealand. She’d already written one sharp, tightly wound campus novel, The Rehearsal, before swinging as hard as possible in the opposite direction into this maximalist historical puzzle. She’s since written Birnam Wood, a completely different beast, a tense contemporary eco-thriller about an activist gardening collective and a sinister billionaire, which honestly moves and grips in a way The Luminaries often doesn’t. If you want proof she can write propulsive, read that one first and then decide if you have the stamina for the slow burn.

If the puzzle-box structure hooked you, read these next

The Luminaries sits in good company if you want more of this specific flavor.

• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, for the original Victorian multi-narrator mystery this book is in direct conversation with.
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, for another book obsessed with structure as meaning, nested and mirrored rather than linear.
• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, for Victorian plotting that actually nails the emotional stakes Catton sometimes lets slide.
• Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, to see the same brain apply itself to something twice as fast and, in my opinion, twice as good.

For your book club

1. Did the astrological structure add to your reading experience, or did it feel like a scaffold you never needed to see?
2. Anna Wetherell is meant to be the book’s gravitational center. Did she feel like a real person to you, or a symbol other characters projected onto?
3. The book shrinks in length as it goes, mirroring the waning moon. Did you notice the pacing shift, and how did it change your reading experience in the second half?
4. Is a novel this committed to structural cleverness allowed to sacrifice some character depth, or is that always too high a price?
5. Would you have finished this book without the Booker Prize sticker on the cover pushing you through the slow parts?