The Luminaries

Walter Moody lands at Hokitika in January 1866, intending to make his fortune on the West Coast goldfields, and stumbles into the smoking room of the Crown Hotel where twelve men have gathered in secret. Each has a piece of a puzzle. A wealthy young prospector has vanished, a hermit has been found dead in his cottage with a fortune sewn into his flour sacks, and the whore Anna Wetherell was discovered insensible in the road the same night. The twelve tell Moody what they know, and their accounts intersect, contradict and conceal in the way of men who each have something to protect. Catton builds the novel on an astrological armature: twelve stellar characters, seven planetary ones, and a structure in which each part is precisely half the length of the one before, so the book contracts towards its end as the pace accelerates. The surface, meanwhile, is pure Victorian sensation novel, with shipping agents, opium, forged signatures, a séance and a courtroom. It is enormous and intricately engineered, and rewards the reader who is willing to hold a great many names in mind at once.