The Luminaries

‘Well, I remember the day that I finally finished the book,’ Catton smiles. ‘It was late at night in New Zealand, and Max got it right away because it was morning where he was. He sent me a whole string of exclamation marks back, and that was it. I woke up the next morning - and this sounds kind of crazy - but I felt like I was immortal. I’ve never felt like that before or since, but the feeling lasted about two weeks. The way I came to understand it was that I’d been so afraid of dying before the book was finished because it was such an effort to get it to work, it was so difficult. And nobody knew how difficult it was, they didn’t know I was planning, or what the ambitions were. I had this terror of it not being done, and my life not having any meaning. And then I handed it in. I just felt so unafraid of death; I thought, ‘death can’t touch me now’. ‘If I were to die now, it wouldn’t matter because the book lives, the book is fine’. When I finished my next novel [Birnam Wood, March 2023], I was rubbing my hands together, looking forward to that immortal feeling. I waited for it to come, but it never did.’ 

Read the full interview here.

‘You read every sentence and you are astonished by its knowledge and its poise. In a way, the winner is a classic Victorian novel with murder, red herrings, conspiracies and fallen women.’

Jake Flanagin, The Atlantic

‘Set in 19th-century New Zealand, at the height of the West Coast Gold Rush, The Luminaries recalls the literary style of the time with impressive accuracy: It’s a massive tome, weighing in at 832 pages, but contains sentence after sentence of quietly observed detail […] Catton maintains multiple storylines with Dickensian dexterity—hapless protagonist Alistair Lauderback stumbles on a string of grisly murders while a cabal of local men convene in secret to discuss them. These intertwined plots unfold against the backdrop of a frontier town that runs on vice: sex, drugs, and murder.’

James Walton, The New York Review of Books

‘It gradually unravels a series of overlapping mysteries to provide an epic Victorian yarn of love, murder, and greed set during the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s. Nevertheless, this is not a book to gallop through—and not merely because the unraveling proves as complicated as anything in Victorian literature itself […] The most unexpected influence of all is extraterrestrial—because this is a novel structured around astrology. Offhand, it’s not easy to think of a less intellectually fashionable subject; but, as with the Victorian narration, Catton takes it on with a wholeheartedness that borders on the obsessive.’

Laura Miller, Salon

‘From the first five pages of The Luminaries, it’s evident that Catton’s model is the Victorian ‘sensation novel,’ in which middle-class characters were suddenly confronted with alarming, inexplicable and uncanny events whose true causes and (usually scandalous) nature are gradually revealed in the course of the story […] All you need to take from Catton’s conceit is the idea that the story itself is driven not by individual characters and their wills but by the ever-changing relationships and combinations among them. You think you’ve got a handle on the nature of its mysteries, then the earth shifts on its axis, the perspective changes to reveal more hidden connections or influences, and you must think again.’

Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

‘There’s a postmodern wink in all of this: for all the language and characters in the impeccably paced and executed opening section, there’s ultimately more truth to be found in the novel’s moving, closing coda […] By bringing these men together — and using their distinct, astrologically coded personalities to illustrate the necessary limitations to their individualized points of view — Catton underscores all that divides her characters. Race, class and gender. Family, culture and education. Addiction, passion and greed. But having posed this problem, Catton sets out to solve it. Insistently drawing characters into relation, the very existence of this novel suggests the insight we gain and how we might be changed by interacting with those around us.’

Kirsty Gunn, The Guardian

‘Apparently a classic example of 19th-century narrative, set in the 19th century, with all the right-sounding syntax, clothing and props, the project twists into another shape altogether as we read, and continue to read […] But it is also a massive shaggy dog story; a great empty bag; an enormous, wicked, gleeful cheat. For nothing in this enormous book, with its exotic and varied cast of characters whose lives all affect each other and whose fates are intricately entwined, amounts to anything like the moral and emotional weight one would expect of it. That’s the point, in the end, I think, of The Luminaries.’

Eleanor Catton’s epic novel was adapted for television as a six-part series, with a script written by Catton herself.

In a piece for the BBC, Catton revealed she had written ‘perhaps 200 drafts of the first episode alone’ by the time the show started filming in late 2018.

‘Throughout the shoot, the scripts continued to change in order to fit the budget and the schedule, both of which got tighter by the day,’ wrote Catton. ‘This was often heartbreaking - a novelist never has to cut a scene they think is working! But it could be exhilarating too, as when the set design introduced new possibilities for action, or when the actors had ideas for improvements to their scenes.’

In an interview, Catton said the show departed ‘so much from the book that I think of it more as a companion piece than as a straightforward adaptation’.

The adaptation aired on the BBC in 2020 and starred Eva Green, Himesh Patel and Eve Hewson.

Watch The Luminaries on BBC iPlayer here

Eleanor Catton became the youngest winner in the history of the Booker Prize when she was awarded the prize in 2013.

That year’s ceremony also marked the first time HRH The Duchess of Cornwall attended the event. “The annual announcement of the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction is the highlight of the literary calendar, and as a passionate reader myself, I’m delighted to be here,” she said.

Catton’s The Luminaries was on a shortlist with The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo and Harvest by Jim Crace.