In The Luminaries, [Little, Brown, & Co, 2013] Eleanor Catton is a
very young author [born 1985] who writes in a very old way. The combination is
illuminating.
Catton is the totally
omniscient narrator, as total as it gets. She not only tells us the actions of
each character, but why they are acting that way, from childhood on. It’s sort
of like reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
The Luminaries
was published in 2013, when she was 28. She probably started writing The Luminaries when she was about 23.
Considering the amount of research that must have gone into it, and the work to
get the voices just right, it’s a remarkable tour de force for such a young
author. It certainly deserved the Man Booker Prize it nabbed in 2013.
Her first novel, The Rehearsal, was her 2008 master’s
thesis at Victoria U in Wellington. She also received a fellowship to the Iowa
Writer’s Workshop.
The Luminaries
is set in the 1866 New Zealand gold rush. It is a combination historical,
mystery, astrological, psychological… something. I don’t mean that in a bad
way; I just can’t think of the proper word. It’s not mish-mash or confetti.
Catton is a good string-of-beads story teller.
The conclusion is a bit
disappointing, ragged and unfinished feeling, but most novel endings are a bit
of a letdown. Maybe that’s why the book feels about a hundred pages too long.
[Take out a hundred and it would still be a very long book for its type.]
Catton, in the old
fashioned way, tells us at the start of each chapter what will occur in it.
Toward the end the “contents” for each chapter are longer than the chapter.
I seem always to read the
second book of a bright new author before the first, which in the case of
Catton was The Rehearsal. This is
because my daughters don’t give me an author’s first book. This 2nd
book was a gift of Mary Beth. But Catton is a gifted author. I look forward to
reading her first book second.
John
Robert McFarland
Daughter
Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in
America will be published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press,
in 2015.
My
novel, VETS, about four handicapped
and homeless Iraqistan veterans who are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will
be published by Black Opal Books in 2015.
In case you missed it, a
Tweet Repeat:
I tweet as yooper1721.
I also write Christ in
Winter: Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/
MY OTHER BOOKS:
NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life
and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them [AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and
Japanese translations] Paul K. Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount,
called it “The best book for cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”
AN ORDINARY MAN
[HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent
with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for
killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full
circle…
THE STRANGE CALLING: Stories of Ministry [Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher,
but I made a deal with God to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,”
though? I said, “I’ll try t for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do
something else.” These are stories of what happened in those years of
questioning the call.
WHEN FATHER RODE THE MAIL and Other Stories of
Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN
978-1-300-38566-0
If you like baseball
poetry, take a look at “Frosty & the Babe” http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml
