I read every word of this chunky award-winning doorstopper, determined to gain bragging rights over friends who admit to giving up partway through it. A neighbour dropped it off, probably worried about my mental health, or lack thereof during our lockdown. It is perhaps the second longest and wordiest novel I have ever read, after War And Peace, which I am now rereading.
In the southern summer in 1865, in the gold rush town of Hokitika on the northwest coast of the South Island of New Zealand a host of mysteries suddenly develop that entangle a banker, various prospectors, a few prostitutes, native Maoris, a pimp, hoteliers, a shipping magnate, a hermit and his estranged wife, a newspaper publisher, a local politician, a jailor, a realtor, a druggist, a Chinese opium den operator and an itinerant clergyman. Gold dust and nuggets show up in the most unlikely places, old enemies from the Opium Wars meet each other on the frontier, and there are disputed paternities; family ties are abandoned, and unexplained disappearances and mysterious deaths are plentiful.
Starting off with chapters as long as 40 pages, Part One takes up 360 pages; Parts 2-12 become mercifully shorter, but cover a jumble of different and earlier time frames, and different sites. Each Part and each Chapter is introduced with either an astrological circle or sign, the significance of which was totally lost to me.
By about page 500 a few of the dozens of apparently unconnected plot mysteries begin to make some sense, but then new twists also arise to keep my confusion and frustration at their previous high levels.
The writing reflects the flowery, wordy, poetic language of Victorian England with endless character analyses and indirect allusions. But this is no War and Peace; there are few insights into the essentials of human nature -few good quotes or lessons by which to better oneself. One quote to illustrate this: “he possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended to regard the gift of intelligence as a licence of a kind, by whose rarified authority he was protected, in all circumstances from ever behaving ill.”
This book won the Mann-Booker prize and the 2013 Governor-General’s Award for Canadian fiction, (Catton qualified as she was born in London Ontario, though she lives in New Zealand), but reading it did nothing to improve my mental health. It did fortify my skepticism about books chosen by semi-secretive boards of elitist literati for various prizes. But I may someday find someone who understood it and enjoyed it.
The Passionate Reader 