2023/109: The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton

2023/109: The Luminaries — Eleanor Catton

'My father always told me, when it comes to whores and fortune tellers, never give your real name... I like the telling fortunes part. It was rather a thrill, to use another man’s name. It made me feel invisible, somehow. Or doubled—as though I had split myself in two.’ [p. 703]

The setting is Hokitika, a gold-rush town on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, in the 1860s. The novel begins when Walter Moody, recovering from a traumatic and possibly supernatural experience on board the Godspeed, walks into a room at the hotel where he's staying, and discovers a group of twelve men (including a Maori and two Chinese) who eventually begin to tell their stories. They're all there to try to make sense of the death of a recluse, the disappearance of a rich young prospector, and the savage beating of an opium-addicted prostitute. The Luminaries also features forged documents, a threatening chap with a scarred face, a glamorous medium, a surfeit of opium, plus illegitimate children, long-held grudges, secret marriages, and a plethora of more or less likely explanations of the death of Crosbie Wells, the whereabouts of Emery Staines, and the mystery of Anna Wetherell's pistol.

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