The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

 

It’s a gimmick book.  If that sort of thing annoys you, then don’t read it.  While I would fall on the side of generally avoiding such things, assuming that it is there to hide what’s lacking, that’s not always so.  House of Leaves would be a prime example of a gimmick book, but it was definitely worth reading, even all those pages with one word on them.  What is going on here is a book of twelve chapters, each half as long as the previous and built around the phases of the moon.  There’s also the characters, twelve of them, representing the various astrological signs.  None of this really intruded on the story to me, and the ever shortening chapters helped give the book momentum as it moves to its end.  It _does_ make the first chapter a long one – this is a hefty book (800 and some pages), and chapter 1 is half of it, but get through that (and it’s not hard) and it’s all downhill.

The story.   New Zealand.  1866.  Frontier gold mining town.  12 men of the town of Hokitika have gathered together to discuss the strange events – a missing young man who has made his fortune, a prostitute who has attempted suicide, a recluse found dead in his remote cabin, and of course, a fortune in gold. Each of the men has his own special relationships to the events and the people involved (particularly Anna, the prostitute).  The newest man in town, Walter Moody, trained as a lawyer but trying his hand at prospecting for gold, stumbles upon the meeting and realizes he has his own part of the story to tell. 

This is a big, complex story, involving old grudges and betrayals, greed, lust, and some nicer aspects of humanity as well.  Much like Dickens, there is a young, innocent hero who is more swept up in the book’s events than driving them, an intrepid detective who may or may not be a step or two behind, mixed in with shipping, prospecting, banking and local political life.  This can be an odd read at times – I thought that Walter would be the main focus of the story, yet he essentially disappears for a long stretch in the middle of the book (he does eventually find his place), and there are some odd plot points that seemed neglected, but were eventually picked up.  It even makes sense why later on, if again, you are willing to go along with some of the more metaphysical aspects of the plot.

Catton is a seriously good writer; she adopts the style of the time and it was pretty seamless to me.  Having read The Crimson Petal and the White at about the same time, comparing the two is a lot of fun – Catton stays squarely in the time in an absolute mode, while Michael Faber slaps modern sexual mores into his novel.

Iceland - Jim Krusoe

Finding an odd book is not that hard; many I have read are at least somewhat out of the ordinary. Much like the country is far away from pretty much everything else, the novel is nowhere approaching ordinary.


Iceland was published in 2002.  The protagonist, Paul, repairs typewriters.  While it isn't clear exactly when this novel takes place, other than it seems to be relatively modern day, which would make the typewriter repair business not a particularly lucrative one.  Paul, though, has more pressing concerns.  He needs an organ transplant (which organ is never made clear, nor what exactly is wrong with his), so he goes to an organ facility, in which available organs are kept floating in a swimming pool.  The organ caretaker, Emily, swims in the pool to keep the organs functional.


It will get even more weird from here.


Paul and Emily end up having sex on the diving board (and apparently elsewhere around the pool, although this only becomes apparent in later sections of the novel).  Unfortunately, Paul, now in love with Emily,  loses contact with her and ends up on an adventure that will take him to Iceland, see him lose a family in a volcano, spend time in prison and a piano bar, and a lot else, in what is a pretty slim novel.


Krusoe spends little time with what we would normally consider the big events in life; they don't seem to interest him as much as the details.  Paul is mostly a passenger in his life, but he does have desires, and in his own way, finds a path to them, even if it takes him years.  This is kind of comic, alt-universe Murakami - weird stuff happens that no one seems to notice is weird, and its never very clear where things are headed, but eventually it gets there.