She is better known as the youngest writer of the longest book to be awarded the Man Booker Prize (2013): Eleanor Catton. She speaks with a sense of wonder which one does not quite associate with an author who has found global success at such a young age. “I think of ‘The Luminaries’ as the novel with two hemispheres, much in the same way as the brain has two hemispheres. On the one hand it (the book) is a fairly straightforward murder mystery of the 19th Century type…in the other hemisphere, in the slightly more hidden hemisphere of the book, a kind of astrological dance is going on…where as you discover each of the characters is typical of the sign and in their emotion they reflect what is going on in the sky.”
Those who have read Catton’s 832 paged novel will know that astrology even determines the length of the chapters and the way the story unfolds. It was both a technique for organization and a fascination with astrology says Catton, “…I discovered that astrology has an incredibly mathematical system and one that has a lot in common with music. In music we have the twelve semitones and the seven natural notes and in astrology you have the twelve signs and the seven planets…a lot of harmonies and combinations that can happen in the sky are similar to that which can happen in music…”
There is more. Catton says there is a website where you find a star generator. You click on the star generator and you can check the star alignment at a particular place and date, past or future. So Catton checked them at the time of the gold rush in New Zealand and found an interesting tool to build her story with.
Catton was two years behind her publisher’s schedule and wrote three times longer than what she had been assigned to. “There are so many risks that publishers have to take that writers do not really get to see…I felt really massively trusted…” But then, it may also help to know that she wrote her first story when she was five years old and it ran into three pages. Her Master’s thesis turned into an award winning novel called “The Rehearsal”. Catton wrote very secretively as a child though and hid it under different names in different folders in her father’s computer.
“I think writing has to be fun. If you are not having fun, the readers cannot have fun…it was a bit of a shock to me that the book turned out to be that long. Obviously when you are writing something it is as long as it is…when I crossed the 200,000 word limit I had a sense of it being long but did not have physical proof of it till the proofs arrived,” says Catton who notes that New Zealand did not have writers like Dickens and George Eliot because literature began there only in the 12th Century. In a sense her book is pioneering that genre. “I was trying to write New Zealand into a tradition...to bring a voice to New Zealand”
Catton says that was not easy because, “It is a different project for a person from a small country because you cannot rely on anybody knowing any of the things you are talking about or reading…you have to create the impression in the reader’s mind and explore it which is a little bit different than when you writing about a place, people or an incident that is already a fixture in the collective imagination of the people’s mind,” says Catton. Writing about well known ideas and places makes it easier for the authors to create imageries with few words.
“Nobody knows how to finish a book when you start it…the book teaches to you as much as you give it… my partner has read and heard this book many times over…”Catton used to read her book aloud every evening to her partner.
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Web link:
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