I must first convey my warm
congratulations to my fellow Kenyan (proud to say that), Okwiri Oduor, for
having won the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story My Father’s Head. I was pretty sure it
was one of the strong contenders, along with Efemia Chela’s Chicken and Diane Awerbuck’s Phosphorescence, and if you missed my
take on it you may find it here.
Now that the World Cup is over, I
can do some greater amount of reading, something I guiltily haven’t been able
to do much of over the past one month. I have indeed read Eleanor Catton’s Man
Booker Prize Winning Book, The Luminaries
(2013), for over a month—the longest I have taken save for an all-time
favourite, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Part of the reason—the World Cup
being the other part of course—is that The
Luminaries is quite voluminous—over 800 pages. But that has never discouraged
a lover of words, and I was soon drawn to its lovely prose, beautiful
sentences, and cleverly crafted story. I was immersed in 19th
Century New Zealand so convincingly that I felt like an invisible observer
walking the streets of Hokitika, pitying Anna Wetherell and Crosbie Wells,
stalking Francis Carver to his nefarious ends, marveling at Walter Moody’s and
the Crown Hotel’s dozen’s mettle and elaborate counterplot, and so on. It has
been a while since I read a story so elaborate and convincing, and one is
astonished to learn that, for all its seeming intricacy, it is simply a story
about love and fate, or destiny—as written in the stars.
Walter Moody, running from a
broken family, arrives in Hokitika, New Zealand, and chances upon a group of
twelve men gathered to solve a mystery—the disappearance of a wealthy man,
Emery Staines; the apparent attempted suicide of a whore (a term used
descriptively in the main, though in some conversations its derogatory sense
was inescapable), Anna Wetherell; and the discovery of a fortune in a home
whose owner, Crosbie Wells, has died. What follows is a slow unfolding of the
mystery, told through the gathered men and through subsequent events as well as
flashbacks to the past.
The depiction of life in New
Zealand in the 19th Century is so complete and credible that it is
hard to believe this story was written in 2013. It is quite a feat to write so
beautifully and in a form of language so evocative of this era. Whether in the
description of places, or the seas, the characters, and events, Catton employs
a style that is as expansive as it is detailed, and as lazily poetic as it is
vivid. The lovely and at times thick prose is complemented and tempered in a
harmonious way by great and entertaining conversations. They are irresistible
in their portrayals of dramatic events, especially the scenes at the
Courthouse. They flow in a most natural way, betraying the tensions, motivations,
and temperaments of the characters.
Through the course of the story we
see some pertinent themes such as colonialism, exploitation, the destructive
effects of opium, revenge, and even corruption. The novel is also a tribute to
the Maori people and culture in a way. These themes unfold as a given, as the
way life was at the time, and thus one doesn’t sense a pontification about
them.
However, astrology comes to the
fore as a tool used to explain the love between Anna Wetherell and Emery
Staines, whose lives, according to a reading of the stars, are fated to
entangle. Is it possible—I am not at all sure—that the twelve men gathered at
the Crown Hotel evoke some kind of celestial formation, probably the twelve
lunar cycles, and perhaps Walter Moody, as the man who sets in motion the
counterplot to tackle the villainous Carver, is the earth around which the
lunar cycles take place? In the context of astrology, I suppose the luminaries
in the story are Anna and Emery. Indeed, like the sun and the moon, the light
providers, they both provide the keys to solving the mystery, and are drawn
together and their fates linked.
Man Booker Prize winning books
have a reputation for dwelling on the “human condition”, tackling innate and
profound human attributes. It would be hard to point to one in this book other
than an intrinsic desire to confront evil and vanquish it: the thirteen men all
work in concert to reverse the devious plan by Francis Carver and
Lydia Wells.
Some say that this story could
have been much shorter—perhaps 400-pages instead of 800. But it wouldn’t be the
masterpiece that it is, would it? I wouldn’t want my relish to end soon while
reading such lovely prose:
As the conjugal act cannot be
spoken of aloud for reasons both sacred and profane, the ritual of the pipe
was, for the pair of them, a holy ritual that was unspeakable and mortified,
just as it was ecstatic and divine: its sacredness lay in its very profanity,
and in its profanity, its sacred form. For what a solemn joy it was, to wait in
silence for the resin to melt; to ache for it, shamelessly, wondrously, as the
sweet scent of it reached one’s nose; to pull the needle through the tar; to
cut the flame, and to lie back, and take the smoke in one’s body, and feel it,
miraculous, rushing to one’s very extremities, one’s finders, one’s toes, the
top of one’s head! And how tenderly he looked upon her, when they awoke.
Reading The
Luminaries is a journey of delight, a luxury whose end one becomes averse
to, and a joy on which one is content to linger. I would doubly recommend it.
Picture Credit: Goodreads
