Continuing with my tradition of being terribly late to cool parties, I recently finished reading The Luminaries (Little, Brown and Company), Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker-winning novel released in 2013. I had delved into the mammoth work late last fall, and had gone through phases of intense and dedicated reading (mainly over the Christmas break), followed by weeks of leaving it aside in favor of focusing on my own work and on the million responsibilities that built up over late winter and early spring.
The Luminaries requires an intense amount of mental energy and focus; author Eleanor Catton paints a gorgeously rich and detailed world of prospectors and swindlers, dreamers and dawdlers, with each character aligned with either an astrological sign or heavenly body. Every story (and character) is carefully, deftly, beautifully interwoven, with the book eventually becoming a pattern of spiderwebs hung against a canopy of stars on a cold spring night. You want to stare and attempt clarity, even as something inside tugs that, to paraphrase Duchamp, the desire to understand it all fills you with a certain horror. It’s a Victorian-style novel, yes, and it’s also a ripping good crime novel, but, like any good crime piece, is also a profound meditation on the nature of greed, identity, and existence.
For book-lovers, finishing a book is akin to the ending of a special relationship, one you know is destined to come to a close, but will nevertheless leave a gaping hole in your life. It’s a hole you know will be filled by many other things (and authors!) but the prospect of that hole existing is sometimes made all the worse by the anticipation involved in its digging. You carry around the ideas and people and world the author has laid out, even as you remember the experiences you had through the process of reading the book. With The Luminaries, my memory is as full with frequently-painful experiences as the book is with unsavory characters and situations. Over the course of the 800-page-plus work, I endured a series of bladder infections, a violent flu, and the start of what became a two-month health odyssey that necessitated multiple surgeries and visits to the emergency room. I also experienced the start of a serious decline in a family member’s health that necessitated huge lifestyle changes for both of us. I can’t begin to remember how many waiting rooms and hospital beds Catton’s tome was taken to, how many times it functioned, alternately, as a soother, a lullaby, a thriller, a prayer, a pillow, a pilgrimage, or, most always, an escape.
As I consumed more chapters (which become progressively shorter, reflecting the movement of the heavens, apparently), I started to read more and more slowly, hoping (in vain) to draw out the last bits of goodness, like sucking at a bone for the most minute dregs of marrow left in the spiny crevices. At a certain point, as the last words of Catton’s work were read late one night (and it should be noted, the book ends on a light, casual note, like an expert nurse giving a needle you didn’t know you needed), I felt a sense of something lifting — not heavy or demanding, but a certain conclusion, as if a very unsettled chapter of life was drawing to a close. It’s funny how we can become addicted to bad things happening, as if adrenaline keeps us awake and needing another fix of the terrible, over and over, so accustomed are we to the dramatically awful. It’s so strangely hard to let those phases go sometimes, to sit back, accept what has passed, and gently remind one’s self that it’s time to break up.
Dear Luminaries, I love you, but this had to end. I’ll always remember Moody, Anna, Lydia, Carver, Mannering, Clinch, Frost, Lowenthal, Gascoigne, Devlin, Ah Sook, Nilssen, Prichard, Quee Long, Balfour, Te Rau Tauwhare, Emery Staines, and poor old Francis Wells. They’ve become permanent residents in the rattling, haunted attic of my life these past months. I may be just coming out of the gutter at last; I’m definitely seeing the stars, wondering at the heavenly bodies, and remembering the glint of spider webs, the silence of moon glow, the rough-smooth texture of gold, the heavy fog of smoke, and the smell of heavy wool after a New Zealand rainstorm. These things live with me, just as much as my surgical scars do. But the story is over now.
Maybe it’s time to see what the attic looks like from the garden. Maybe it’s time for sunrise. It’s time to dry off and see what I’ve mined.
Laura N.
I am ashamed to admit that usually your stuff is a bit too smart for me — ones on music come to mind. But I love books and I can certainly relate to the "relationship" we form with books. I too have been transported by many a book and felt sadness in reading its last pages. You make me want to read The Luminaries — really, can't believe I haven't already — and find a good friend in it. One that will be with me for a long time (800 or so pages worth of a good time). Thank you for sharing your personal struggles — hang in there! — and thanks for shining your light on this book.
Laurie
Yes, a very fine book. I listened to the audiobook version. There's a great deal of pleasure to be had being read to.