Last year's Man Booker Prize winner, Eleanor Catton's #The Luminaries, is a massive read. Set in New Zealand gold mining territory in the 1800s, it has all the ingredients of a Victorian Sensationalist feast: it is all at once a whodunnit and the tale of a mysterious woman, with gloom, and rain, and a seance; with plotting, theft and murder, and with rain - oh and more rain. It's a book to spend time with. Or well, maybe...
For it's curiously opaque; characters go out in the rain, and come in from the rain. It makes a promising start with Walter Moody (who most definitely comes in from the rain)... but somehow as the novel progresses, it all becomes... well, a little damp. It's as if we're reading sitting in the damned New Zealand rain; the more we attempt to become engaged with the novel, the more the ink runs and it blurs.
Don't misunderstand; it's an intricate novel, very carefully constructed, and the language and detail feels beautifully authentic. And what goes around comes around in the most Victorian, Dickensian way. But one can't help feel that when all is done and (gold) dusted, it has rather escaped, somehow. Dickens fans (we love him!) may find Catton's characters curiously difficult to pin down. It is as if we view them all from behind the most carefully placed and delicately, cleverly woven, muslin hanging. Most authentically Victorian, of course; but damned hard to see through.
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