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Tag Archives: Eleanor Catton

Four (More?) Years!

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Charles Finch, Eleanor Catton, Elizabeth H. Winthrop, James Brydon, James Naughtie, John Banville, Kenneth Wishnia, M. J. Carter, Nicole Lundrigan, Robyn Cadwallader, Tim Pears

This week, Novelhistorian turns four, which means I’ve reviewed more than two hundred books. As many of you know, each year I write a post in which I mention, in thumbnail, those that have made the deepest impression on me–or, to put it another way, those I expect I’ll still remember after another fifty-odd books have passed through my hands. This year, I’ve chosen eleven, as follows:

Nicole Lundrigan conveys the hatreds, will to vengeance, and oppression that mark Tito’s postwar Yugoslavia in The Widow Tree, told through the eyes of three teenagers. Her tense, moving narrative shows that for war’s survivors, trust is the first casualty.

The Infidel Stain follows the two amateur detectives M. J. Carter introduced in Strangler Vine, this time in 1840s England, as they unravel the mysteries behind murders committed in a politically charged atmosphere. Carter’s prose and characterizations are first-rate, and she re-creates the upheaval of the Hungry Forties with breathtaking vividness.

Paris Spring, James Naughtie’s excellent thriller about the Paris student uprising of 1968, echoes John Le Carré in its elegant plot with few moving parts, focus on motive, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. It may resolve too neatly, but Naughtie knows his ground, especially the brethren of spydom.

Eleanor Catton tells a Victorian-style epic mystery in The Luminaries, about gold-rush greed, deception, and loyalty in 1860s New Zealand. Where many authors struggle to intersect two disparate lives without resorting to contrivance, Catton seamlessly weaves more than a dozen threads. Skip the astrological charts she includes and dive in.

In The Fifth Servant, Kenneth Wishnia renders a remarkably imaginative mystery, set in sixteenth-century Prague. The Christian community claims that a girl has been murdered so that the Jews can use her blood to make Passover matzo–the old blood-libel myth–and a rabbinical student attempts to solve the case by using his knowledge of the Talmud.

With Mrs. Osmond, John Banville pens the unthinkable, a sequel to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, down to the loop-the-loop sentences that invariably arrive at truth and the intense feelings rendered in a gesture, a glance. But it’s far more than imitation James, which you need not have read to appreciate this novel; Banville underlines the heroine’s masochism, which, he argues, amounts to vanity, an unusual, striking perception.

There are grittier mysteries out there than The Inheritance, but Charles Finch’s warm-blooded Victorian detective, Lenox, is an exceptionally clever sleuth, and the understanding of human nature and the kindness and generosity that suffuse the writing make this novel stand out. Not only will you be entertained, you’ll learn tidbits of information that Finch likes to throw in–for instance, why the British drive on the left.

It’s not kindness or generosity that mark The Moment Before Drowning, James Brydon’s tale that blends colonial war in 1950s Algeria with a grisly murder in Brittany, but it’s a terrific story, and I guarantee it will grip you and make you think. Brydon juxtaposes the two narratives to ask what purposes the law and its enforcement actually serve. Be warned about the torture scenes, but nothing is gratuitous or sensational.

The Wanderers, Tim Pears’s gorgeous, subtle novel, tells a heart-breaking story about two teenagers’ suffering and longing, set in Devon around 1912. She’s the daughter of the manor; he’s the servant’s son exiled from the estate. Pears leaves questions hanging, which will bother some readers, but his prose and characterizations are flawless, and the tension never lags in this simplest of plots.

Another novel I admire for elegant simplicity is The Anchoress, Robyn Cadwallader’s superb tale about Sarah, an English girl in 1255 who chooses to be a religious hermit at age seventeen. Why she does so, and how her choice changes many lives, not just her own, makes a remarkably complex story, so beautifully and truthfully rendered that you have to remind yourself it’s a first novel.

Last on my list, but only because I reviewed it most recently, is The Mercy Seat, Elizabeth H. Winthrop’s elegiac tale about Louisiana justice in 1943. Nine voices recount the hours before the scheduled execution of Willie Jones, an African-American teenager convicted of rape, and how the verdict has fractured the town. Winthrop manages to recount this heart-rending, provocative story in brief, staccato chapters that form an eloquently coherent whole, pure sorcery that will haunt you.

Those are my eleven favorites. I’ve enjoyed writing my reviews this year and hope you’ve liked reading them.

Twelve Angry Men: The Luminaries

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, Eleanor Catton, gold rush, historical fiction, literary fiction, multiple narratives, mystery fiction, New Zealand, nineteenth century, Victorian epic

Review: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton
Little, Brown, 2013. 830 pp. $27

It’s 1866, and Walter Moody has endured a trying journey to Hokitika, New Zealand, the last of his troubles being a shipwreck. All he desires, therefore, is a restful hour or two before a warm fire, so he heads to his hotel’s smoking room. But twelve men occupy this space, and Moody soon learns that he’s blundered into a secret meeting. As he finds out only after they’ve carefully vetted him, a prostitute has attempted suicide; a wealthy young man who was with her hours before has inexplicably disappeared; and an enormous fortune has shown up in the home of a noted drunkard.

The number twelve obviously suggests a jury, and aptly so, because they’ve agreed to pool their information regarding these criminal events. It’s their luck — and Moody’s — that he’s had legal training. At first, he’d rather not participate, for he’s come to Hokitika to pan the gold fields. But his regard for truth and his vanity about his powers of observation draw him in, and he concludes that many of the twelve fear implication, whereas others seem united in their hatred of a key suspect and would love to prove his guilt. The dozen include, among others, a brothel keeper, a jailhouse minister, two Chinese miners, a Maori stone carver, a newspaper editor, a druggist, a banker, and a court clerk.

James Ring’s 1870 photograph of Hokitika (courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, via Wikimedia Commons)

I find this premise irresistible, and the way Catton narrates her story, orchestrating how these disparate lives intersect, is nothing less than breathtaking. Some novels strain too hard have two characters from very different walks of life cross paths — Manhattan Beach comes to mind — but a dozen seamless interweavings breaks the bank, not to mention how Catton involves the four or five other characters who weren’t invited to the meeting, yet play key roles. To be sure, Catton has an advantage in that a nineteenth-century gold-rush boomtown attracts a dizzying panoply of adventurers and hopefuls whose greed, pride, lust, prejudices, self-regard, and dreams provide a potentially rich field in which to prospect. But to make the claim pan out takes diligence and skill, and Catton tells her lengthy, intricate tale with sureness and aplomb.

To do so, she’s chosen a distinctly Victorian epic style, which works, for the most part. Consider this passage from Moody’s point of view, when he recalls the storm he passed through at sea:

The storm began as a coppery taste in the back of one’s mouth, a metallic ache that amplified as the clouds darkened and advanced, and when it struck, it was with the flat hand of a senseless fury. The seething deck, the strange whip of light and shadows cast by the sails that snapped and strained about it, the palpable fear of the sailors as they fought to hold the barque on her course — it was the stuff of nightmare, and Moody had the nightmarish sense, as the vessel drew closer and closer to the gold fields, that she had somehow willed the infernal storm upon herself.
Walter Moody was not superstitious, though he derived great enjoyment from the superstitions of others, and he was not easily deceived by impression, though he took great care in designing his own.

Note the long, looping sentences, the heightened senses, and, at the end, the explanation of character. That last feature takes getting used to, and sometimes I winced when I read such passages. (Part of Catton’s goal is to show how pride, self-presentation, and self-interest obscure truth from the observer, a case she makes convincingly.) But to her credit, Catton carries the style all the way through, depicting a mindset plausible in its time and place, without smelling salts, melodrama, or black-and-white, overdetermined characters. If The Luminaries feels Dickensian, it’s in the episodic chapters that you could envision appearing in serial, and in the way they each begin with a summary (“In which So-and-So does such-and-such”). But the dialogue feels natural rather than strained, despite the scarcity of contractions, and if the prose and tone create a romantic feel, there’s plenty of grit and ugliness to go around.

I don’t understand the attempt to graft astrology onto the narrative, nor do I find that interesting. I skipped the astrological charts before each section and their coyly vague explanations, in which each of the twelve men occupies a single house. After all, it’s a long book, and to me, the charts were a mere distraction. Conversely, odd as it sounds for a book this long, the narrative leaves a couple or three loose ends.

Nevertheless, The Luminaries is a fabulous novel, and, for those who care about awards, it won the Booker in 2013.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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