One: I’m writing this post with a moderate migraine lodged behind my right eye. Probably I should lay down and not strain my eyes staring further at a screen, but migraines often make me more obsessive than usual, and I’ve got it in my head that I’m going to write my thoughts on The Luminaries today since I finished it last night and if I procrastinate, I’ll never get it done. And this book took me over a week to read. That’s a very long time for me to read a book. It’s long and heavy (the book, in terms of pages and weight). Be warned.
Now Two to $$\omega$$: My thoughts on The Luminaries.
I never really know how to rate long books. Even in long books that I end up despising (for example House of Leaves), generally there are sections that I enjoyed (there are some good spooky bits when they go exploring into the house). Similarly, in long books that I love a little more than should be allowed (Infinite Jest), there are always sections that are little more than flaming excrement (The Ebonics Chapter).
I also never know how to rate novels that I’m not enamoured with, but not because the novel is inherently bad or low-quality. I don’t want to rate lowly because the book didn’t personally grab me the whole way through, but do I rate a book highly because I can see its genius even if I was a bit meh overall? I think David Sexton’s review says it best:
Let’s concede that The Luminaries is a stunning feat of construction. The Booker judges knew, whatever else its merits, they were giving the prize to a tremendously technically accomplished piece of work
(although I think the next few sentences he writes are a bit too vitriolic. But, funnily Sexton had a similar experience to me in that he got to about page 150 while he was on holiday and then started to really question whether it was worth continuing. I don’t know where Sexton was vacationing, but I was in a yurt in Fundy National Park.)
This is an precisely constructed novel. The book is full of clever schemes. I’m usually old-hat at figuring out clever schemes, but these ones were beyond my Agatha Christie-honed skills. I appreciate that. I appreciate clever novels and clever twists, but then less so when there’s suddenly a bunch of astrological silliness about entwined fates. I don’t mind ghost or horror stories, but I’d rather be in-all on a paranormal story than just side plot for two (maybe three depending on how you count it) characters. But the idea of The Fates leads into the novel’s main theme of fortune, and, as I think it says on the dust-jacket, fortune in every sense: making a fortune, telling fortunes (as with the astrological symbols), being fortunate (lucky), the whims of fortune. But the coincidences the Fates/Stars/Deities throw at the characters start to feel contrived, no matter how many characters, in a self-aware, post-modern way, discuss how odd all these coincidences are.
And of course characters. Like with The Lifeboat, which I read this Spring, there are so many characters. I know that 19th century novels are supposed to be like a subway going downtown at rush-hour, but there are so many characters and I don’t know enough about gold rushes to be able to one hundred percent distinguish their jobs. What’s the difference between a shipping agent and a commission agent? Why is the gaoler also the Commissioner? Are those separate jobs? Did somewhere earlier in the book tell me that? Some characters could have likely been combined if slimness had been a goal (maybe Sook Yongsheng and Quee Long, maybe Thomas Balfour and Charlie Frost, maybe any of the other two Caucasian men). But there are twelve men there for the Zodiac so combining them means the book loses that structure which ties back into the idea of fortune, which in turn goes back to the parts of the book I liked the least.
What I liked best: The spelling of connexion, which is always how I spelled connection until, one afternoon sitting in OAC Chemistry, a poster told me that I should have been spelling connextion as connection, which I then switched to to avoid embarassing spelling-related incidents (obviously the poster was not about spelling the word connection and likely had something to do with chemical bonds and my Chemistry partner might have alerted me to that poster because of my spelling of connexion on our lab report, I don’t rightly recall).
All of this is a long-winded way of saying what I said much more succinctly when I reviewed Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal:
Sometimes I read novels and get mad that I am not writing novels because I want to write novels like this one. Well, most of the time. The rest of the time it felt more like a technical piece than anything enjoyable – sort of like eating kale, you know it’s good for you but you’d really rather have the cake.
So I rated The Luminaries the same as I rated The Rehearsal – 4.5/5. Don’t expect me to write anything as long or as clever as this either.
Man, writing reviews is hard. I always sound so pedantic. So much for my career as a book reviewer having publishers send me free books to review.