Man Booker Prize shortlisted Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre

Eleanor Catton at Southbank Centre
Tuesday 10 September
On The Luminaries, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize

‘The novel is the most expansive and supple form that exists. It is almost like a virus; it keeps adapting to remain resilient. It pushes the boundaries of what is possible.’ A resounding testimony of faith in fiction from one of the most talented writers of fiction today; Eleanor Catton’s talk on the night of the announcement for the Man Booker Prize shortlist proves her worthy of her place upon it. She spoke yesterday with eloquence and erudition on everything from the beauty of paradox to the mathematics of the Golden Ratio.

Her shortlisted novel The Luminaries is set in the New Zealand Gold Rush of the 1860s. A weighty tome of 832 pages, is has been hailed as an ‘ambitious’ work not because it is somehow deficiently aspirational, but because it interweaves through an immensely complex structure (based upon rigidly adhered-to astrological schema) a rollicking tale of murder, greed and revelation that defies the seeming arbitrariness of its composition.

Catton was captivated by the notion that ‘each aspect of the zodiac planets governs a part of the self that makes a whole’, and accordingly based each of her characters on a zodiac sign and determined their behaviour by its defining features. The chapters are also governed by the Golden Ratio, necessitating that each is half as long as the preceding chapter (hence the sizeable length of the novel).

This may seem an artificial construct that could impose a certain clinical flavour upon her writing, but the reverse is the case. She gives a typically unassuming caveat to the potential strangeness of her self-imposed structures: ‘my internal monologue is saying ‘don’t sound like too much of a crackpot’ at this point...’. But crackpot she certainly is not; Catton is clearly an author who thrives upon structure but who populates that structure with a world both vividly realised and compelling. Her desire to use the Golden Ratio stemmed from the sense that it is appreciated as beautiful in the visual arts, in mathematics and even in the simple shape of a door or a book, and that its beauty could be manifested in literature but has never been tested. The Luminaries seems both empirically and emotionally to prove the truth of her hypothesis.

The skill of Catton’s writing is in forming her characters fully, allowing their psyches to develop and absorb the reader while building them as ‘spheres within spheres’, each entwined with the next so they become parts of the whole. She cited the influence of Martin Buber’s philosophical tract I and Thou, which led her to investigate the notion that the zenith of life is found when souls truly comprehend each other, understanding themselves to be kindred spirits within humanity.

If this all sounds highly conceptualised and abstract, Catton’s flair is for combining such ideas with a characteristic down-to-earth quality in both her writing and her speech. In last night’s talk, she shrewdly compared the novel to TV box sets, acknowledging that the latter can now ‘give space for psychological complexity’ almost as holistically as the former. Similarly, she acknowledged the pressures on a New Zealand writer shortlisted for the Man Booker; as only the third nominated Kiwi and youngest ever shortlistee, she hopes that she can set the standard for a new generation of writers from her country to contribute to its relatively nascent canon.

She wears her virtuosity with a lightness of touch that turns her systematised, byzantine novel into a timeless human tale. Catton speaks of writing dialogue (one of her particular strengths) as ‘an orchestration, requiring the writer to be a composer, and to be invisible'. And The Luminaries truly is a structural, narrative and emotional symphony, worthy of the praise being heaped upon it.

Follow me on twitter @BetweenTheReeds