It was clear that Eleanor Catton's first novel, published in 2009 and written when she was just 22, heralded the arrival of a spectacular talent. The Rehearsal, a kaleidoscopic narrative about a school scandal among teenagers studying music and drama, jumped about in time and space, shuffling ideas about performance, adolescence and psychology like a pack of cards. It was ambitious, experimental and sometimes downright odd – but seductively, compulsively readable too.
Her second novel, a great doorstopper of a murder mystery set against the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s,, looks at first sight very different; but it carries forward both her epic ambition and commitment to the sensuous pleasures of reading. She does not make things easy for herself: she has organised her 800-page epic according to astrological principles, so that characters are not only associated with signs of the zodiac, or the sun and moon (the "luminaries" of the title), but interact with each other according to the predetermined movement of the heavens, while each of the novel's 12 parts decreases in length over the course of the book to mimic the moon waning through its lunar cycle.
But while she has set herself such arcane formal constraints, much of the novel's appeal lies in the fact that it is a compulsive thriller. Catton describes herself as "very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama … at last the novel has found its on-screen equivalent". This is a book to curl up with and devour, intricately plotted and extravagantly described, a pastiche of the Victorian sensation novel in the same smart yet playful vein as Sarah Waters. There are drug dealers and prospectors, prostitutes and con artists, secrets and plots galore: the book is sprinkled with gold dust and soaked in opium. New Zealand literature lacked a Victorian epic: Catton has set out to fill that gap while, like Michel Faber in his neo-Dickensian novel The Crimson Petal and the White, peering through doors Victorian writers had to keep shut.
And yet the reason the judges gave the prize to Catton, rather than to either of the two other serious contenders – Jim Crace's parable of land and dispossession, or Colm Tóibín's spare, shocking portrait of the Virgin Mary – must be for its investigation into what a novel is, and can be. If a story is predetermined, does that change the way we read it? What are the consolations of fiction, and where do we find meaning: in personality or pattern, individual or structure? Such metaphysical questions underlie the confection of her plot.
Next year the Booker admits US authors, and some fear the rest of the world will be overshadowed. Catton's talent is already shining too bright for that to be a problem for her.
