As a novel, The Luminaries is structurally ornate. The Booker Prize-winner is 832 pages long and divided into 12 parts – one for each sign of the zodiac, each systematically decreasing in length according to the pattern of a waning moon. There are celestial charts, and at the head of each chapter is a 19th century-style precis of events to come.
The book’s slippery story about fortune-hunters, opium, con tricks, shipwrecks and a murder trial is told from multiple perspectives, leaving readers unsure of who or what to trust. By the end, the plot – about a dead man on New Zealand’s South Island during the West Coast Gold Rush of 1866 – comes deliberately unravelled in your hands.
All of which makes the idea of a TV adaptation total madness. A story told on such shifting sands would be incomprehensible on screen. Translated literally, Eleanor Catton’s formal devices would give us 12 episodes,...
The book’s slippery story about fortune-hunters, opium, con tricks, shipwrecks and a murder trial is told from multiple perspectives, leaving readers unsure of who or what to trust. By the end, the plot – about a dead man on New Zealand’s South Island during the West Coast Gold Rush of 1866 – comes deliberately unravelled in your hands.
All of which makes the idea of a TV adaptation total madness. A story told on such shifting sands would be incomprehensible on screen. Translated literally, Eleanor Catton’s formal devices would give us 12 episodes,...
- 6/19/2020
- by Louisa Mellor
- Den of Geek
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