The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

You will be amazed at how clever this novel is. And yet....

It's written in imitation of 19th Century novels, complete with appropriately formal language, a large cast of characters, and multiple plot strands. In true Gothic tradition, it begins on a dark and stormy night with a stranger arriving at an inn and happening upon a mystery. It even has those pre-chapter summaries favored by some Victorian authors. And yet, as it turns out, it is more a parody than an imitation.

The twelve men who have some involvement with the mystery reportedly have personalities based on the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac. Astrological charts are given at the beginning of chapters. The action evidently proceeds according to the movements of heavenly bodies (luminaries). And yet, how many readers know that much about astrology and how many care to do the research to find out? But it must be admitted that the device is clever.

The book is divided into twelve parts (12 men, 12 signs of the zodiac--you get the picture), and each section is half the length of the preceding one. As the sections get shorter, the pre-chapter summaries get longer, until most of the action is reported in the summaries. That's cool; that's clever. And yet, it makes the last half of the book just a summary of the solutions to all the mysteries that have been introduced in Part 1, which is 360 pages long. (Did I mention that the novel is 830 pages?)

Even the dust jacket is clever, picturing twelve phases of a moon, from full to waning.

The mystery concerns three possible crimes that all happen in one night: the death, apparently from alcohol poisoning, of a former prospector for gold (or was it murder?); the attempted suicide of a whore (or was it just an opium overdose?); and the disappearance of a wealthy businessman (perhaps murder, too). The clues are given in bits and pieces, mainly reported through conversations repeated by the aforementioned twelve men. And yet, one of the men observes, "...never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view." All the carefully and lengthily documented information seems to lead to no clear conclusion until the last parts of the book when all is explained in a rather hasty manner.

This novel reminds me of a somewhat common Christmas or birthday joke, when one is given a beautifully wrapped large box which, when opened, contains a smaller beautifully wrapped box, which contains a still smaller box, and so on and so on, until the last tiny box, which usually contains a ring or something else small of great value. But what if the joke is a cruel one, and that last box is empty? All that lovely and careful craftsmanship leading to...nothing.

This novel is beautifully and cleverly planned and executed. And yet....

By the way, it won England's Man Booker Prize for 2013. Take my review as a second opinion.