A review by ergative
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

4.25

This was structurally brilliant, and I really admire the complexity of the interweaving plot. And Professor Sarah Hart's brilliant book, Once Upon a Prime, lays out the mathematical underpinnings of the structural brilliance, so I admire it even more. Still, the nonlinearity of the narrative, especially towards the end, didn't quite work in terms of the storytelling. I already knew what had happened in most of those vignettes, so seeing them on the page, possibly only because, to make the math work, we needed a few pages here and a few pages there, felt just a bit forced -- and because it came at the end, it felt forced in a way that lingers out of proportion to the actual problems by those extraneous few pages.

Also, as far as I can tell, there are duplicate bonanzas? Or did Crosbie dig up Staines's gold, and that's how it ended up in his cabin? I still didn't quite follow that bit. I clung on to the passage of that money with my fingernails, and if it's the same £4000 the whole way through, then it's very elegant that it ends up in Crosbie Wells's cabin. But how did it get from where Staines buried it, to Wells's cabin?