Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
This been my first Blog post Ever, I would like to present you a review written by me of the wonderful book The Luminaries.
Its The Best Book In The world.
It truly is. I just love it.
A withered old man is dead, a whore is found unconscious on the street, a young man has disappeared, all on a single day of 14th of January 1866; & in between these miss-happenings ventures the enigmatic tale of fortunes gained and lost. To investigate these profoundly luring scenarios; 12 men, with such a myriad collection of origins and cultures (there’s also a vista of different languages of these people, but English been their lingua-franca, is used in almost all of the conversations) that the reader is sure to be curious; assemble in the crown hotel, who are, to their dismay, interjected by a stranger who has arrived in the town that very morning. They are prompted to share their stories, which are, as it turns out, so much tangled into each other that it is not until the very end that the whole picture comes into the light.
After the meeting at the Crown, the tale starts to take a pace and many of the mysteries of the first part are solved in the coming parts. The disappeared young prospector is found, but not until it’s too late. A fortune is rediscovered and by the time the story winds up, the main villain has been executed and the stranger has taken his step out, of a town still trying to engulf the recent proceedings.
The full book is divided into 12 parts, with first part being the longest. It is the first part that appears to be running with a slow pace and in which the main story-line and the characters are developed. Its 12 individual chapters narrate the different stories of all of these men.
A point worth mentioning here is that the principle story follows a period of about four months (from 27th January to 27th April of the 66th year of 19th century), which are comprised in the first 3 and a half parts and the other 8 and a half parts take us a year before and tell the story from then.
Now, there’s another important underlying. All of the 12 men who gather for the discussion in the first chapter, have been each assigned a zodiac sign & there’s another set of 6 characters who have been assigned six different planets. Not only have these people the names of celestial objects, but they also act and interact in accordance with the nature of zodiacs they have been given. This literally is a feat seldom witnessed in any historical fiction.
The author, Miss Eleanor Catton, details the characters and the backgrounds quiet vividly. The situations and the surroundings are very well described and almost all of the township’s architecture and planning is evident by the wordings. The novel’s descriptive nature and its ardent emphasis on behaviors of people is surely lucrative to one’s knowledge and understanding of the book and indeed helps to picture the character as a real human.
Needless to say, the first thing that a reader catches in the book is the language. The use of Neo-Victorian English gives life to the story and makes one to delve into it. Since the time of the tale is the Victorian Era and since the town is also a colony of the British Empire; the use of this language makes for a golden match.
This is feast for the one trying to get a book which is a both a mystery & a history, a tangled up mess of numerous accounts on the outside and yet with a clear underlying link with eachother; an interwoven tale of murder, addiction, revenge on one hand and love, treasure, ambition on the other.
Highly recommended and supremely enjoyed, a beauty to behold.
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