Daily Times

In a literary marketplace that sometimes seems oversupplied with novels about brittle intellectuals feeling alienated from their emotions, or twentysomethings grinding axes about their exes, there is the wonder of Eleanor Catton: a novelist of lavish technical gifts who addresses herself to the world, broadly and richly conceived. Catton’s first novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal, was a small miracle. Leaping acrobatically between fictional and metafictional modes, it tells the story of a secondary-school scandal restaged by trainees at a local drama school. There is something almost Brechtian about the way it shocks you out of familiar fictional comfort zones and something almost Wildean in the way it lobs its arch perceptions, like glittering little hand grenades, at all sorts of social and artistic pieties. Catton’s second novel, 2013’s The Luminaries, was a large miracle. Running to 821 pages and set among the gold fields of 1860s New Zealand, The Luminaries is structured around two highly artificial conceits. At one level it spins an intricate pastiche-Victorian mystery revolving around gold, opium and changed identities. At another, its structure follows elaborate astrological rules – a prefatory “Character Chart” notes which characters are “Stellar” and which “Planetary” and so forth.