John Mullan on The Luminaries – Guardian book club
Has a novel ever been more strangely yet elaborately organised? Eleanor Catton's huge neo-Victorian novelThe Luminaries is structured according to strict astrological principles. Each of the main characters (and there is a large number of these) is aligned with a star sign or a planetary body. A prefatory "Character Chart" lays this out for you and each of the novel's 12 parts opens with an astrological chart, bafflingly illustrating the heavenly influences on some of these characters. Individual chapters have titles such as "Mercury in Capricorn" or "Saturn in Libra" – indications of the influences and relationships that will be featured. Catton appears to have found out the true positions of the relevant celestial bodies on the dates she gives.
The astrological scheme also controls the novel's chronology ("In deference to the harmony of the turning spheres of time").The Luminaries is divided into 12 dated parts, spaced at almost monthly intervals. We begin on 27 January 1866, but in Part Four, dated 27 April 1866, we also go back to the events of a year earlier, and the remaining eight parts replay the events of 1865, moving phase by phase through the zodiacal pattern. This is the most elaborate machinery of all, because the decreasing lengths of the succeeding parts mimic the waning moon, each part being half the length of the one before it.
Some reviewers have been exasperated: how could such hocus pocus provide the ground plan for a serious work of fiction? (Though literary critics forgiveChaucer for organisingTroilus and Criseyde by astrological principles andSpenser for using the zodiac inThe Faerie Queene.) Others were admiring but befuddled: were we expected to comprehend the notes about celestial precession or work out which sign of the zodiac had been allotted to which character? Readers ofJames Joyce'sUlysses should know their way aroundThe Odyssey; are Catton's readers expected to make narrative sense of the astrological charts that preface each part ofThe Luminaries?
Yet what could be more fitting for the recreation of a world whose characters are obsessed with fortune? The novel is set in the ramshackle town ofHokitika, on the west coast of New Zealand. It has grown up for only one reason: gold, which has been found in the hills around it and the river that runs out through it into the wild ocean. The novel is a complicated mystery. Everything turns around the Earth – or, in this narrative, a murdered man, Crosby Wells, denominated "Terra Firma" in the novel's opening cast list. The plot apparatus comes from Victorian sensation fiction: suspect wills and forged documents, secret marriages, illegitimacy and opium. Yet astrology predominates over these: the denouement will be the discovery not of the culprit, but of the "luminaries" of the book's riddling title. They are the sun and the moon, and are the story's pair of lovers, revealed in a chronological return to events that have taken place just before the novel's opening episode.
The length and episodic complexity of the novel are such that one can never hold the plan of it in one's head. Even the most gripped reader on a summer holiday will need several days to complete it, and many will take several weeks: in the many spaces between readings recollection of relations between characters will ebb. Catton uses astrology to give us the confidence that there is a finely calculated plan. The sensation novels ofWilkie Collins, which are antecedents toThe Luminaries, often had unusual structures (like the three "epochs" into whichThe Woman in White is divided) that advertised the fact of some hidden narrative principle. On every page of Catton's novel you are aware of minute design. The world in which it is set – a half-built town on the New Zealand gold coast, peopled by chancers and fugitives – may be provisional, even chaotic, but the novelist presides over it and will make every accident and mystery cohere. "We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture …", she will say, calling attention to a narrator's impersonal omniscience.
However little understanding of astrological jargon any reader might have, one has complete confidence that Catton has committed herself to her conceit. The novel even has a fortune-teller, Lydia Wells, an unscrupulous manipulator who has graduated from her former occupation as a prostitute. Dick Mannering, the portly goldfields magnate who owns much of the town, challenges her to prove her fortune-telling abilities and calls her a swindler. ("I have the greatest respect for swindlers … I count myself amongst them!") He wants her to admit, just between the two of them, that she knows it is all nonsense. But she will do no such thing, for faith alone sustains her trade. It seems a vignette of the novel's own dealings with the reader. We do not imagine that the author believes in astrology, but we do expect that she has used it scrupulously. The astrological framework imparts to every character a destiny. While giving us visible assurance of the novel's plot, it also demonstrates that this is a novel about plotting.
Eleanor Catton will discussThe Luminaries at the Guardian book club on 8 April at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Tickets: £9.50 online/£11.50 from the box office.kingsplace.co.uk.