Wheels Within Wheels

In the lobby of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY there’s a fun piece of art that’s just perfect to stare at for a few minutes while waiting in line to get in to your movie.  It’s one of those complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions in which balls enter at the top and make their way through a fascinating series of ramps, levers, see-saws, etc. and end up at the bottom, only to be reinserted at the top.  You can’t help but be intrigued by how each little part of the mechanism works.  The variety seems endless, and the rhythms and counter rhythms set up by all the balls bouncing through the different parts at the same time is very entertaining.  Well, at least for a few minutes while you’re waiting for your movie.

That’s my overall impression of The Luminaries, this year’s Booker prize winner from Eleanor Catton.  At 830 pages, it's one of those big ones that require a tray table on an airplane.  Would probably be a good candidate for reading on an e-reader.  There’s nothing special about the hard copy except that I found the font to be a little light and hard to read after a while. Catton combines an old-fashioned complicated story with some newfangled concepts:

Old:  A real plot which is revealed to the reader gradually, point by point, through the entire book.  Lots of characters that are well differentiated from each other. A striking opening scene that does recall Dickens, at least in spirit.  A trial scene.  A love interest.  A who-done-it mystery. Lots of assumed names and legal documents. And a touch of the supernatural, a la Wilkie Collins.

New: The plot does not unfold chronologically, but rather the narration jumps around in time, and follows a complex astrological sequence of precession.  While the book is divided into chapters, the length of the chapters is carefully controlled.  The first is 360 pages.  The last is less than a page, and there’s a logical (in this case mathematical?) progression from the length of the first to the length of the last.

The story takes place in the New Zealand gold rush of the mid 19^th century.  It’s not a period I know much about, and that held some interest for me.  But except for the Asian influence (a few Chinese characters and a major role played by opium) and the obvious British flavor of it all, it all seems familiar from accounts of the California and Alaska/Yukon gold rushes from about the same time:  the chance to start one’s life again in a new place with new opportunities, the makeshift amenities, the greed, the improvised and fickle sense of law, the corruption, the alcohol and prostitution, the eccentric characters, the impermanence of it all.

We enter the outer layer of the plot at a point close to the end of the chronology, as it turns out.  We gradually follow the wheel around into inner wheels, and then into inner inner wheels.  The mechanism is fascinating and complex.  It’s fun to see the tiny pieces fall into place one by one.  There are clues skillfully dropped here and there, and also some blind alleys that end up going nowhere.

But the writing itself is disappointing.  It doesn’t have the sharp wit and playful exaggerations of Dickens, nor the other-worldly glow of Wilkie Collins.  It comes across to me as imitative and bland.  There just isn't much beauty or interest in the words themselves.

And the plot?  Well, there are many many characters, and while Catton does differentiate them pretty well, I just didn’t really care about any of them.  They're elements in a complex mechanism and are essentially controlled by the mechanism.   I guess the clockwork itself is the point?  Consider, for example, the love interest.  There are two characters very much in love.  Their love is very deep, even supernaturally so.  But one of these characters doesn’t actually appear until near the end of the book, and the scene in which they fall in love, while we know vaguely of it early in the book, Catton only describes it near the end, and even there she tells us what we need to know to understand the machinery.  There’s no glow, no attraction, no human interest.  The interest is the mechanism itself.  It almost feels like the machinery and the artificial structural rules are in charge.  The result is interesting, but quite detached and ultimately (for me) unsatisfying.  Not nearly enough to keep me happily engaged through 830 pages.  I ended up not caring a whit about the astrology or the strict structure because I didn’t really care about the characters or the writing.

How different is Murakami’s 1Q84, a book of about the same length.  The plot is also complex (albeit in different ways), it unfolds in an interesting fashion, and there is a love story at the center of it all.  But here we really care about the characters, and the love story packs an enormous emotional wallop.  Yes of course Murakami is a different sort of author with different ideas about writing and different goals.  But I still find the comparison useful.

The piece on the wall at the Jacob Burns is fun to look at for a while, but after a few minutes of waiting in line you have your movie.  With The Luminaries, that’s it.  That’s all she wrote.

Austerity

The latest Paul Auster memoir, Report from the Interior, disappointed me.  He’s such an innovative writer I expected something more striking.  It’s a book in three parts.  The first is about his boyhood.  The second is about two Hollywood movies and the influence they had on him as a boy.  The third, and by far the most interesting, quotes letters from him to Lydia Davies from his twenties.  Davies (a prominent and important novelist and translator in her own right, winner of the 2013 Mann Booker International Prize) was his girlfriend at the time.  They would marry later.  Some notable passages from the letters:

‘. . . to get going again, to write, you must meditate, in the real sense of the word. Honest, painful. Then the hidden things will come out. You must forget the everyday Lydia, your sister’s Lydia, your parents’ Lydia, Paul’s Lydia – but then you will be able to come back to them, without loss of inspiration next time. It’s not that the two worlds are incompatible, but that you must realize their interconnections.’

 

The Book of Illusions is one of my all-time favs.

‘He <a friend> spoke of order, precision, limited tasks, I of chaos, life and imperfection, unable to agree with him about the imminent annihilation of the individual. For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only be beginning within and then . . . moving without. Expression, not mastery is the key. <He>, I believe, is still too much of a critic, too absorbed in abstractions that are not counterbalanced by the brute facts of gastral pains. Stick to life, I say. I will make it my motto. Do you agree? Stick to life, no matter how fantastical, repulsive, or agonizing. Above all freedom. Above all dirtying your hands.  . . . I saw that I had once and for all broken the bond with … academic prattle, with the seduction of neat ideas, with literature spelled with a capital L, elegantly embossed in fancy leather bindings.’

The memoir is written in the second person, which gives it an almost eerie personal tone. Knowing more about his literary pedigree does make me respect him more. Nonetheless I was hoping for more.