The Luminaries: A D?ned Fine Tale, but of What?

Abstract

The Luminaries (2013), Eleanor Catton’s novel of nineteenth-century New Zealand, has won wide international acclaim, including the Man Booker Prize. Yet many readers find the work exasperating to read—a “nightmare,” to use a term Catton herself suggests. In large measure, this response emerges from Catton’s use of heavy structuring devices, particularly astrology and mathematics, that pertain to the time period of her fiction. These frameworks tend to make totalizing claims, often through causal or linear progression, and to support modern, realistic protocols of reading. As this essay demonstrates, Catton undercuts those claims, and frustrates such readings, by emphasizing multiple paths of comprehension and multiple voices of narration. The Luminaries embraces its multiple structural mechanisms, but is not dominated by any of them.