The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The Blurb:

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 twelve 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 Review

Occasionally I like to read award winning books, for three reasons:

a) I like to see what the hype is about

b) I want to know what 'highfalutin' literary critics think count as excellent books

c) It makes me look more intelligent. (WHAT? Don't pretend you don't all do something equally pretentious within your lives - I see you)

But sometimes I forget that these books are usually not picked by the masses. They are picked by a very small subset of literary intelligensia, who, lets not forget read for a living. I think they must be actively looking for something different, something unlike the plethora of books they read as part of their jobs. But because of this, I feel like the more complex the book, the more likely they are to shortlist it....

Let's start with the length of this book. No more so than with The Luminaries has the description 'a weighty tome' been appropriate. This is 840 pages of intense prose, so if you're going to attempt it, be ready to be in for the long haul. This represents quite a time commitment, even for a fast reader like me, so I was hoping to be well rewarded for such dedication!

OK, so it's reeeaaallllly long - but that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. So was 'A Little Life' and I never ever wanted that book to end. However this book has more characters than you can shake the proverbial stick at. We start off with the clandestine meeting of 12 men and although their back stories are somewhat drip fed to you in the first chapter, it was all I could do to keep their respective narratives straight in my head. Add to that the fact that the book then starts to jump around with the timelines, it had me doing one of my most hated things when reading - flipping back and forth on multiple occasions to remind myself of who someone was, their relationship to another character or what had happened to them to date. I don't have TIME FOR A BOOK TO MAKE ME WORK THIS HARD!

That said, at the end of the first chapter, our protagonist helpfully summarizes what we know so far and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Had I known that was coming I would have saved myself a whole load of time.

From then on, for the middle third of the book, I loved it. The book, although recent, is written in Victorian style prose and really makes you feel as if you are reading a vintage classic. The characters are incredibly interesting and there was enough mystery to keep me intrigued. And I was so hopeful - things began to make sense! All the pieces were falling into place!

And then, in the last third, it starts to recap, and we jump around in the timelines again and things don't make sense anymore. There was an awful lot of recapping of things we already knew but from another character's viewpoint, but that didn't help to tie up any of the confusing and frustrating loose ends. For such a time commitment I was looking for a better payoff. Yes its beautifully written, and yes the plot is devilishly clever, but both these things were overshadowed by how hard this book made me work and how in the end it just wasn't quite as clever as it thought it was. Harrumph.

This is me, just demonstrating that the definition of a reaaaaaaaalllly long book, is when its half the width of your very round face...!

#ManBookershortlist #Crimethriller #classics #4star #satire #mystery