Hannah Kent: An Australian Iceland?

This book began with an account of my own efforts as a scholar, in 1985, to understand Australia. It will end by examining the work of two writers born in that same year, 1985, both young women from the antipodes who exploded onto the world literary scene in 2013. Hannah Kent and Eleanor Catton are very different writers who, in Burial Rites (2013) and The Luminaries (2013), wrote books very varied in setting and tone. Kent’s is dark and mournful, set on the other side of the world from Australia. Catton’s is expansive and high-spirited, set in nineteenth-century New Zealand. But these two writers are comparable not only as authors born in the era of neoliberalism, and therefore taking its consequences as a given, but as examples of how novels from the antipodes unfold not just across the globe but within the temporal space of today. Both have operated from early in their careers in transnational arenas, taking advantage of international networks well disposed to youth and innovation, and not hamstrung by constraints of genre or national tradition.

Critics such as Rita Felski, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have warned against “symptomatic” or “deep” readings of literary works, readings that privilege a hidden “ultimate” meaning over what is superficially apparent.1 Such readings are often ideological: feminist, Marxist, Freudian, and so on. Just as it is easy, once you are a feminist or a Freudian or a Marxist, to seek out books that lend themselves to an ideological reading, so it is easy, if one is an Australianist literary critic, to see “Australia” in nearly anything, particularly when the writer is Australian. My analysis of Stead’s Letty Fox in Chapter 2 is an example of such a reading. Similarly, in a 2013 interview, Kent linked her book’s Icelandic setting to her Australian homeland: “I see a certain connection to Australians’ attitude and relationship towards our natural landscape: We too live in a country that can be simultaneously beautiful and hostile.”2 Unlike Catton, who has consciously put her fiction, at least The Luminaries, in a postcolonial context, Kent has tended to resort to the affective in locating the intention of her work.

Burial Rites is set in Iceland in 1829, where a reluctant farming family has been coerced into housing a female prisoner who has been condemned to death, Agnes Magnusdottir.3 One strand of the narrative describes what happens after this compelled quartering; it deals with Agnes’ confinement in the family’s farmhouse as she awaits her demise and seeks, with the aid of a sympathetic priest, to come to terms with it. The other is told in flashbacks by Agnes to Tóti, the priest who listens to her. That Iceland, Christian Europe’s first colony, was colonised by Viking “barbarians”, casts light on what has been called Australia’s “settler/invader culture” and its tenuous claims to enlightenment.4 The remoteness of both Agnes’ time and, even further back, Iceland’s initial settlement, bespeaks, on Kent’s part, of a Greenblatt-like desire to speak with the dead, which, as with Greenblatt himself, may well be driven by a sense that the existing order is haunted by unacknowledged demons. The victimisation of women (exemplified by Agnes), the inefficacy of conventional religion (as seen in Tóti), and the procedural limitation of constituted authority (as seen in Jón Jónsson, the farmstead father), are familiar themes for readers of Australian fiction. The theme of imprisonment resonates with the Australian convict tradition. As Sarah Anderson points out, medieval Iceland did not have a royal court even though it was governed by a kingdom, and neither of course did Australia.5 Iceland and Australia both emerged as active participants in world diplomacy in the wake of World War II and the increased American role in the world; an alliance with the USA during the Cold War was an important part of both countries’ histories. And of course, the Icelandic language is related to English, and courses in Icelandic and Old Norse were often a part of traditional English literature degrees, a tradition derived from Oxford and Cambridge.

Although Burial Rites has not garnered the international success of Catton’s The Luminaries, inevitably Kent’s early acclaim tends to occlude what is actually in the book. As Les Murray put it in “Lifestyle”, in “the tall cities” the “world is not made of atoms / world is made of careers”.6 While it is always useful to understand a writer’s professional approach to authorship, an excessive emphasis on a writer’s career is as limiting as a purely formalist emphasis on content. Even works that adamantly declare their independence of the cash nexus, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, are, as Thomas Pfau has shown, implicated in it.7 Alexander Welsh, writing on Dickens, and Svetlana Alpers, writing on Rembrandt, have shown the role played by economic pressures in the creation of these artists’ greatest works.8 But, even in the case of frankly commercial writers such as Nevil Shute and Bryce Courtenay, there is something to be said for attending to plots, characters, themes and symbols, just as one would in a highbrow novel. It is no less one-eyed to see books as purely commercial than it is to see them as purely aesthetic; the interpretive always lies somewhere in between.

Kent’s novel raises fascinating interpretive issues. First of all, Iceland – unlike Greenland – does not have indigenous people.9 There was no permanent population in Iceland in 874 when the Europeans came. It is rare that a habitable country has no people. Although Iceland offers Kent the chance to portray a harsh, rigid, parochial, misogynistic and authoritarian settler culture in an ecological atmosphere at once beautiful, unusual and fragile, it does not, unlike Australia, raise questions about the treatment and rights of indigenous people. Iceland’s settlement by the Vikings places it in opposition to the first known contact between Europeans and indigenous people in Greenland and the North American mainland. Annette Kolodny has argued that this paradigmatic encounter in Greenland was subversive of established paradigms in that it was difficult for the Vikings to posit themselves as more advanced than their native Greenlandic counterparts.10 Iceland thus serves as a reminder of the West’s fragile hold on its own claims to civilisation, a paradox observed in Alex Jones’ Morris in Iceland (2008) when Jones, a scholar of Indigenous Australian languages, describes William Morris’ Icelandic sojourn with a clear awareness of other European pilgrimages to remote lands such as Australia.11 Bev Braune, in her experimental project Skulvadhi Ulfr (2001), which uses the Viking as an analogue for migratory movements across the Atlantic, including the Black Atlantic, as well as for experimental form itself, does something similar.12

Furthermore, the Vikings were not securely Christian at the time of their foraging and exploring in the North Atlantic. In Kent’s Iceland, Christianity, however long established in institutional terms, still seems something of an overlay. The island’s residual pagan past is palpable. There are echoes of the Icelandic sagas, which embody the tension between a still-robust paganism and the wave of Christianisation that swept over all of Scandinavia at the beginning of the eleventh century, and which the seemingly unrepresentative charity and humility of the priest, Tóti, to whom Agnes confesses her crimes, reveals as only superficially regnant in the early nineteenth.

Any novel by a non-Icelander set in Iceland belongs to the genre the Canadian critic T. D. MacLulich called “the Northern”, an equivalent of the Western, in which a wild frontier casts a consoling pastoral light even on the harshest narrative material.13 The Northern was a mode by which Canada could define its identity; Kent performs the reverse, projecting outward into another space. The Northern is also consciously not “Southern”, and the genre evades Latin America, Africa and Asia as possible subjects. This is slightly paradoxical in an Australian context, as Australia’s north is the tropics, and Jon Stratton has argued that Australia’s Northern Territory is the “least real” area of Australia, the most laden with exoticism and the imaginary.14 Furthermore, there is no direct demographic relationship between Iceland and Australia: if Kent were from Canada, which has a migrant Icelandic population, her interest would seem more organic. Australia does not have such an Icelandic presence, although Jeremy Stoljar’s 1992 book My First Mistake, with its portrayal of an Icelandic migrant to Australia, comes close.15

Part of the resonance of Iceland lies in its very remoteness. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s 1995 film Cold Fever portrays the efforts of a Japanese man to mourn his parents, who have died in a plane crash in Iceland. The country’s remoteness also figured in its role in the post-2008 Global Financial Crisis, when Iceland’s rapid privatisation made it vulnerable to the near-collapse of the worldwide banking system. The 2014 Icelandic musical Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter satirises this incongruity; Iceland’s distance from the rest of the world made the financial crisis there more drastic and visible. Like Australia’s, Iceland’s exposure to neoliberalism was particularly drastic because there had previously been a culture of solidarity, a solidarity born of a stark environment and the conformity imposed on the population by colonisation. The institution of the badstofa – the collective bed in which Agnes has to sleep during her imposed sojourn with the farm family – is emblematic of this dark side of solidarity. In the badstofa, individuals sleep in separate enclosures within one large wooden frame. It is a symbol in Kent’s book for the nonexistence of privacy and personal liberty. Anyone who attempts to be an individual is reminded of her vulnerability and her contingency; she is reduced to what Giorgio Agamben has famously termed “bare life”. The solidarity that emerges among people living in a cold, forbidding landscape is calcified into a culture of exposure and humiliation.

In the cases of both Iceland and Australia, a free-market outlook had the undeniable appeal of unleashing individual energy and creating social winners of a sort that had not previously predominated. In the Iceland of Burial Rites, everyone is poor, but there are still winners and losers, and even in death Agnes is marginalised and misunderstood. Now, the stories of the losers can be told. Yet the division the world makes between winners and losers is more emphatic than ever. Kent, in telling the story of Agnes, provides on one level a contrast to today’s more humane methods of punishment and on another a prehistory of the brutality of now. Paradoxically, the novel, while telling the story of a loser, is itself a winner, as Kent succeeds precisely where Agnes failed. This is part of the novel’s pathos, as the very act of speaking for Agnes is – unavoidably; there is no possible way Kent could have done otherwise – an act of privileging the voice that speaks for her,

The global success possible to Kent is an index of this division, although that is hardly Kent’s fault. Lynda Ng, in her analysis of the transnational subject matter and success of Antoni Jach, Evelyn Juers and Anna Funder, says that the international success of these writers suggests that Australia’s multicultural and multi-ethnic population can “choose … to inherit the world”.16 Ng provides an eloquent statement of what Australian writers can achieve if they embrace all of the connections and networks now available to them. But what of readers outside Australia? How do they process this Australian transnational inheritance? Is Australia like a hub airport, where Icelandic material changes planes on its way to the metropolis? Or is Australia a producer of substitutes for other national literatures, a vendor of simulacra like those produced in the Sirkus of Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith? Transnationalism succeeds precisely by propagating the subject of the national, returning to what Timothy Brennan called “the national longing for form”; the nation is propagated internationally even as those very international connections supersede it. But in Kent’s case, unlike in the case of Salman Rushdie and his relationship to India and Pakistan, Iceland is incontestably not her own nation.

Yet Kent cannot be accused of simply exploiting exotic material, or of swooping into a region to which she has no ties. As a teenager, Kent spent a year in Iceland as an exchange student, and her sense of the landscape is vivid and earned. Moreover, although Burial Rites is based on actual historical events, her take on them is highly revisionary. That the novel takes place in Iceland, rather than in Denmark, the colonial administrator, is notable. The Danish state’s officials as depicted in the novel make clear that this is done for two reasons. One is economic: the price of bringing the condemned to Denmark would be too high, and Kent is amusing throughout on how the state, so cruel to this victimised if not entirely innocent young woman, is also risibly cheap, avoiding cost overruns even as it tries to maintain its supremacy. Hunavatn District Commissioner Bjorn Blondal finds the price quoted by the local blacksmith for the manufacture of the axe with which Agnes is to be killed to be excessive. An axe is imported from Copenhagen but ends up costing twice as much; the parsimonious plans of the colonial government are foiled. Thus not only the injustice but also the incompetence of the state is revealed (82).

Yet the Danish colonial regime, although ill equipped, knows what it is doing. In quartering the doomed Agnes on the farm family, it is not only saving money but also reminding the family that they too are controlled by the state, even though they have committed no crime. All citizens are potential subjects of surveillance and Agnes’ public execution reminds the entire community that it is under state control and better remember it. There is also a sense that all of Iceland, including the colonial administrators who have been sent there, are second-rate. The imputation of subservience and mediocrity onto the subject population is a function of the administration’s projection of its own inadequacy.

It is against this background that we understand why Agnes sought out the man who led her to commit her crime, Natan Ketilsson. Natan is an attractive young farmer, one of the few individuals in the book to display a creative spark. He writes poetry and encourages the sundry women in his life to do so too. The anonymity, conformity and deference that underlie such institutions as the badstofa are repulsive to Natan, and he tried to escape them, adopting the surname of Lyngdahl (traditionally most Icelanders do not have surnames at all, only patronymics). Nineteenth-century Iceland is puritanically Lutheran, still warding off a residual paganism and distantly conscious of the revolutionary and romantic stirrings in Europe and America (President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after all, claimed that Iceland was part of North America, in trying to defend it from Germany). In this context, Natan is an outsider, and the rhyme of “Natan” with “Satan” was frequently used in popular doggerel about him, both during and after his lifetime (87). A cross between Lord Byron and Charles Manson, Natan was so charismatic that he became a dark star; he attracted all the attention, leaving Agnes to obscurity while he, although castigated, achieved a posthumous local celebrity. The Agnes the narrative portrays is anything but that. Well past thirty, illegitimate, poor, superfluous, she is seen as guilty in Natan’s murder even though ultimately it was Natan who led Agnes to believe that he loved her. Natan toys with Agnes, but, inevitably, deserts her for a younger, more beautiful woman. This fuels Agnes and a spurned lover of the other woman to collaborate in Natan’s killing, Yet the killing, as Kent depicts it, is not totally intentional: it is manslaughter, not murder. Agnes is not only disadvantaged by the system, and thus the ideal person to serve as a scapegoat. She is also caught between two conflicting modes of domination: the bureaucracy of the state and the dark romanticism of Natan.

The novel’s canvas would be totally dark were it not for the priest, Tóti. The Canadian poet Steven Heighton, who reviewed the book in the New York Times, found Tóti “a stereotype: meek, callow, indecisive and given to pious, predictable counsel”.17 This misses the point, however, that between bad bureaucracy and bad Byronism, Tóti is the only disinterested person in the book, and he attends to Agnes in subtle duality, giving her both the interest and disinterest she needs. Tóti cares about her, but he knows he cannot save her. He desires at least to tend to her soul. Agnes asks for Tóti to be brought to her as a spiritual counsellor in the one act of autonomy she is allowed in the entire book. She asks for this particular priest because she remembers that he did her a good turn when travelling in perilous conditions, something which Tóti, to his embarrassment, does not remember; he sees her as just another member of, to use the contemporary locution, the precariat. Tóti seeks to grow as a result of hearing Agnes’ story, but he knows that any sort of redemptive narrative is limited. Agnes will inevitably be killed. Indeed, his powerlessness makes him the best moral witness to the situation.

Unlike Natan, whose appeal is charismatic and erotic, Tóti’s appeal is spiritual and consolatory. Although Agnes cannot make up the damage caused by her misplaced pursuit of Natan, she can, in her honesty to and reliance upon Tóti, model a different sort of relationship, one marked by concern rather than appetite. Through Tóti, Agnes indicates to the state that it, too, might show concern instead of institutional callousness. But the state is deaf, and has the surveillance of the entire community, not just the chastisement of Agnes, on its mind. Tóti is reminiscent of the clerical figure that often crops up in Australian convict novels, such as Mr North in Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. Tóti is ineffectual, not, unlike the alcoholic Mr North, because he has any visible moral flaws but because he cannot countermand the authority of the state; he can speak truth to power, but no one will listen.

In her foreword to the recent anthology Sight Lines (2014), Kent disclaims any redemptive or world-improving power for literature but states that literature “questions. It doubts. It plumbs the depths of the human heart and surfaces with both beauty and the ugliness that lurks in unexpected corners”.18 If the role of the state reveals ugliness where there should at least be the simulacrum of justice, Tóti’s witnessing – again given his integrity by the way he can only provide very limited help – is one of the book’s unexpected beauties. Kent, however, is not claiming a reductively aesthetic disinterestedness. With respect to the historical record, Burial Rites is a subversive and paradigm-changing book. The story of Agnes and Natan is famous in Icelandic folklore, and Kent learned of it during her stay in the country. But in Iceland, all the fame has accrued to Natan, at once culprit and victim, and little to Agnes, at once scapegoat and perpetrator. Kent has restored Agnes to centrality in the story. Kent’s delineation of colonial governmentality, the interstitial practices of colonial discipline beneath the overt frames of political administration, demonstrates that patriarchy, gender hierarchy and misogyny are perhaps their last vestige. It is interesting that the notoriety of Agnes’ execution is that it was the last execution in Iceland. Were people so appalled by her suffering that there was social reform? Or did the state simply decide to put on a velvet rather than an iron glove? Foucault’s famous remark, in Discipline and Punish, that the reform of the prison system was coextensive with the prison system itself might be pertinent here. Even if one takes the first, more inspirational view, a woman had to die in order for the state to reform; a narrative of progress, of emergence from brutality, was only possible over a dead female body. Another Australian book in a totally different genre – the fantasy novel Hades’ Daughter by Sara Douglass – illustrates the same point.19 This is a historical fantasy of the ancient world, set a hundred years after the fall of Troy, about the mythical Trojan migration to Britain. Like Burial Rites, Douglass’ novel is about a colony in which women are treated brutally, and both novels implicitly evoke the settler origins of Australia and its antecedents in previous European conquests and mythologies of conquest. There is a connection between the subordination of women and empire, as if a structure in which women are controlled were a prerequisite for other manifestations of authority.

Burial Rites tries to bring justice and dignity to victims of past cruelty and prejudice. Yet the past cannot endlessly be mined for the purposes of the present, or the very distinction between present and past that makes the retrieval of the past interesting will fade. The idea that the present is rational and the past irrational, that the present represents enlightenment and the past injustice, will be upended. Just as fossil fuels cannot be our main source of energy forever, there is a danger that we will exhaust the past – that we will run out of reserves to draw on. Bain Attwood has commented that in the 1970s, a prominent historian predicted “the death of the past”, but, as of 2005, when Attwood was writing, there was a worldwide “growth of public interest” in history.20 Attwood commends this as an interest in previously suppressed stories such as those of Indigenous Australians. History can mean asking new questions of the past on behalf of the present. But an interest in history can also mean an uncritical yielding to past authority. And the literary surge of history and the historical novel, however many striking works it has produced, can only last so long and yield so much. The stark and grave eloquence of Kent’s superb book, traumatic on the level of plot, is just as traumatic on the interpretive level, as it figures a crisis of history itself and its use in fiction. As the Western Australian poet Ian Reid puts it:

History can matter in the present, and in Kent’s novel it certainly does. But the way it matters might well be highly disturbing, bereft of the costume-drama reassurance that the neoliberal consensus often seeks in the historical novel, to anneal the disruption of the present. The way Kent makes history present renders this annealing impossible.

Eleanor Catton: New Zealand’s Rehearsal

Some readers will feel disconcerted by this book on contemporary Australian literature closing with a discussion of a New Zealand writer, so before we proceed to our analysis of the superb and provocative work of Eleanor Catton I wish to offer a rationale for this inclusion. Even if Australians and New Zealanders know themselves to be different because of their very different histories, they also experienced similar colonial regimes and were the subject of similar geostrategic positioning. Contemporary literary institutions such as the Man Booker Prize group the nations together in listing the regions eligible to win the award. Most global readers who encounter Australian literature will, like I did in the 1980s, encounter New Zealand at the same time. Inevitably, the two nations have often shared writers, such as Eve Langley, Henry Lawson, Ruth Park, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Stephen Oliver and Douglas Stewart, all of whom spent time on both sides of the Tasman. Moreover, the 2012 meeting of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature was held in Wellington, and New Zealand scholars such as Lydia Wevers and Philip Steer have participated in Australian literary-academic life.

Even if my inclusion of a New Zealand writer in a discussion of contemporary Australian literature is a gross misunderstanding by a deluded outsider (I do not believe it is, but I understand some readers may see it that way), what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls méconnaissance, or creative misrecognition, might be the cost of global access to Australian literature.22 Globalisation brings instantaneous communication but not necessarily instantaneous understanding. To transnational readers, Australia and New Zealand – Australasia – are widely seen as part of the Anglophone South Pacific, much as transnational readers see Cuba and Argentina as part of Latin America, or Estonia and Bulgaria as part of Eastern Europe. In all cases, this may be misrecognition, and I would argue that the latter examples represent a greater misrecognition than the case of Australia and New Zealand, which are linked not just by language and colonial history but also by sport, popular culture and trade. But transnationalism is no less free of misrecognition than any other human relational state, such as politics or sex. Neoliberalism and its unimpeded markets may allow information to travel more quickly. But attitudes in different areas are still out of joint, remaining resistant to conformity of understanding. Part of a national literature becoming transnational is its becoming subject to these arbitrary but at times consequential misunderstandings. Sometimes these misunderstandings can yield useful insights. For instance, while it has been a struggle for Australia internally to see itself as part of the Asia-Pacific region, global readers, since World War II, have been prone to see Australia in an Asian context.

Pre-eminently, however, the reason Eleanor Catton is included in this book is that her work – both her fiction and her public commentary – has lashed out against the cruel inequalities of neoliberalism in a way no Australian writer has, and in a way (thanks to the cultural proximities mentioned above) that is highly resonant for Australia. The dismay some Australian writers might feel at seeing a New Zealand writer included here is part of the pain of globalisation, sorrows that are concomitant with its pleasures.

When Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, a massive book of well over 800 pages, won the Man Booker Prize in 2013 it carried all before it, making news in a way that no book from the antipodes had since Peter Carey’s early days. Catton may be said to have succeeded in being transnational with respect to earlier writers in her own national literature, while still providing international readers with a sense of New Zealand. Catton’s work harks back not to the various nation-building New Zealand modernists of the twentieth century – Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow, and in her own highly idiosyncratic way Janet Frame – but to an earlier New Zealand, before the political hegemony of the left was established under Richard John Seddon and William Pember Reeves (himself a somewhat lyrical, if stiff, poet) in the 1890s, with what Reeves himself called “state experiments”, the visionary policies of social welfare and women’s suffrage for which New Zealand became famous.23 Instead, The Luminaries harks back, not only in temporal setting but in emphasis, to the era of the pro-capitalist premier Sir Julius Vogel (himself a novelist, of a science-fictional bent), to the free-market prehistory of a socialist and late-modern New Zealand. Equally, The Luminaries can be seen as following in the footsteps of Jane Stafford and Mark Williams in Māoriland, with their revaluation of the pre-nationalist period from 1872 to 1914, in contrast to the usual New Zealand nationalist privileging of late-modernism.24

The Luminaries, however, is not polemical in its view of history. Catton’s first book, The Rehearsal (2008), is contemporary in setting and is not set recognisably in New Zealand. That book addresses competition, performance and meritocracy. The Luminaries, historical and set recognisably in New Zealand, emphasises money and its attainment, and sees happy endings in individual rather than collective terms. It is as if Catton needed to go back to the 1860s to portray a recognisably liberal New Zealand, a mirror for that of a contemporary New Zealand in which New Zealand’s modern welfare state has been fractured by an inequality that threatens to promote what Max Rashbrooke calls “segregation” in society.25 The previous Booker Prize winner from New Zealand – Keri Hulme’s 1985 The Bone People – was associated with the coming to power of David Lange’s Labour government in New Zealand, with its refusal to accept nuclear-armed US ships and its arrest of the French saboteurs who bombed the environmentalist boat the Rainbow Warrior. Intriguingly, The Bone People, for all it puts relations with the indigenous people at the forefront of its concerns, is also set on the west coast of the South Island, a comparatively conflict-free zone in New Zealand history compared to the North Island, where extensive warfare between Pakeha and Māori occurred in the nineteenth century (as depicted in Maurice Shadbolt’s New Zealand Wars trilogy).26

Shadbolt’s trilogy did quite well in the United States, and his peculiar combination of economy and historical breadth proved enticing for the world market. In general, however, the writing of twentieth-century New Zealand, with its emphasis on the struggle for national self-definition, as seen in the poetry of mid-century writers such as Charles Brasch, James K. Baxter and the earlier Allen Curnow, had little international appeal. Janet Frame did, but her work was radically extra-territorial. For over twenty years, the poet Bill Manhire’s writing program at Victoria University of Wellington has produced writers such as Elizabeth Knox and Emily Perkins, who received worldwide distribution and at times seemed poised for worldwide success but never quite secured it.

In a sense, The Luminaries’ success had been gestating for years. As early as 1993, the popularity of Jane Campion’s film The Piano brought alive the New Zealand landscape as a locale both exotic and familiar. Since the early 2000s, people in New York and London publishing had been telling me that the Australian “wave” was probably over, and that New Zealand would be the next big thing. In 2012, New Zealand was a “featured nation” at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Catton was the fulfilment of a series of anterior prophecies.

This might infuriate people who remember the succour the young and struggling Janet Frame found in the humble shed of her mentor, the established author Frank Sargeson, and the other austerities of the twentieth-century writing scene. Yet if the neoliberal era stresses cosmopolitan networks and distribution methods, the resourceful writer not only uses these but can critically reflect on them. The Rehearsal critiques the way young adults are made to complete and to alter their personalities in order to prevail at what should be a creative, artistic exercise. The Luminaires ultimately offers love, not money, as the solution. Neoliberalism often insists on the need to repeal the twentieth century and instead looks back to a happier and freer nineteenth century. The Luminaries, which harshly critiques the workings of money in the nineteenth century, blatantly subverts this paradigm.

Equally, the collapse of the twentieth-century socialist model of New Zealand, along with New Zealand’s emergence as a global tourist destination by dint of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings being filmed there (2001–2003), marked new opportunities. Islands have traditionally played a subversive role, both literally and metaphorically, as explored in the theory of Gilles Deleuze and the critical work of Elizabeth DeLoughrey and the Australians Suvendrini Perera and Elizabeth McMahon.27 Australia itself has moved from emphasising the solidity of its continental status – which contributed to the demand for fictional heft – to its littoral and liminal qualities, as seen particularly in Alexis Wright’s use of the sea in Carpentaria and de Kretser’s use of the sea in Questions of Travel. Thus the success of The Luminaries, like that of Burial Rites, should not be complained about or resented; it should be explored for its transgressive potential. In January 2015, Catton eloquently criticised neoliberalism, not only in New Zealand but in Australia and Canada, as “profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry”.28 These remarks led Catton to be attacked by right-wing radio hosts as unpatriotic. They seemed shocked that someone who had sold so well would dare to bite the hand that fed her. A previous Booker winner, Arundhati Roy, had provoked a similar reaction when she turned to political activism. That Catton portrays a capitalistic, pre-socialist economy in The Luminaries is at the very least provocatively double-sided.

The success of the Tolkien films surely if circuitously helped that of the film version of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (2002). Moreover, the books produced by alumni of Manhire’s MA program have often had a fantastic element; C. K. Stead described Elizabeth Knox’s Black Oxen (2001) – a book Stead rightly saw as a tremendous achievement – as “Harry Potter for the bigs”.29 Although lacking overt fantasy, The Luminaries, with its ingenious complicated plot and its creation of a vivid, autonomous world within its pages, can be read within this tradition, in which New Zealand fiction is linked with the cultural capital of internationally successful fantasy.

Rehearsing for Recognition

Yet this is not true of Catton’s first novel, 2008’s The Rehearsal. A masterpiece of voice and structure, it is set among a community of young men and women in their late teenage years, musical and dramatic performers who are rehearsing for plays and concerts. Necessarily, there is also an allegorical sense of the late teenage years as a rehearsal for life, although it is a rehearsal that is often richer in its tensions and ramifications than the real thing. The golden boy who returns to the drama institute to show how he has made good says “drama school makes you never congeal. You never set or crust over. Every possibility is kept open – it must be kept open”.30

The striving of the young people in The Rehearsal is not just their own, but that of their parents. One of the teachers mimics the thinking of these pushy parents: “On its own, my life is ordinary and worthless and nothing. But if my daughter is rich in experience and rich in opportunity, then people will come to pity me: the smallness of my life and my options will not be incapacity, it will be sacrifice.” (18) Thus the striving and competitiveness in this novel is not just an attribute of the younger generation, but something imposed or at least abetted by the elder generation. In pushing their daughters to be winners, these mothers are making a final attempt to be losers who win. This is why any critique of neoliberalism must take into account late modernity as well: the way the system – in this case the neoliberal system – co-opts any potential challenges. In this it resembles modern governmentality as dissected by Orwell and Foucault.

This is glimpsed by the boy who, in The Rehearsal, complains that “nobody says anything terrible at all” about the school the young performers attend; “nobody gives the finger as they walk out the door”. The protagonist of the novel, Stanley, responds that “it’s a prestigious school. I guess people just really feel strongly about that.” (40) People have so much of a stake in the system that they cannot criticise it. To question it would be to endanger their own status. Yet Stanley’s sense of ordinariness, his indifference to his situation’s high stakes, makes him the most balanced and sensitive character. To be humane in The Rehearsal, one has to be insulated to a degree from what is going on. Without this insulation, one might career around, motivated only by the thrill of risk. The teenage Julia observes that a teacher sleeping with his student is exciting because of the risk it entails; it involves “the possibility that you might lose” (50). This is reminiscent of the allure of extreme sex in Winton’s Breath, and of the spectre of sublimity and disaster that neoliberalism in general affords.

Unlike The Luminaries, with its highly specific setting in nineteenth-century New Zealand, The Rehearsal is set very vaguely “now” and in an unnamed English-speaking country. Many of the adults in the novel are either not named at all or referred to mainly by their occupations, as if their jobs are what define them. An exception is Mr Saladin, the teacher who sleeps with one of his students. In a novel so denuded of proper names, a foreign name, reminding us of a great Arab leader of the past, stands out. Moreover, there is the inevitable association with Saddam Hussein, who likened himself so frequently to Saladin in the years before the book was published. Mr Saladin is both an outsider and potentially a megalomaniac.

The female saxophone teacher who replaces the fired Mr Saladin is mostly called The Saxophone Teacher, although, in a detail missed by most reviewers, her actual name is indeed given: Mrs Jean Critchley (43). This name alludes to Miss Jean Brodie in Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher who attaches herself to her female students in a way that is both inspirational and excessive. We are meant to realise that even though The Saxophone Teacher seems a more benign, less rapacious figure than Mr Saladin, and less ideologically partisan than the crypto-fascist Jean Brodie, she is manipulative and over-invested in her students, and possibly has erotic interest in her female charges, or at least an interest in their erotic lives.

The Rehearsal is highly recursive, as the students are auditioning for a play based on an accusation of sexual harassment made by a student, Victoria, against Mr Saladin. Meanwhile Victoria’s sister, Isolde, is manipulated by The Saxophone Teacher into a romantic relationship with Julia, a fellow pupil who has questioned the school’s handling of Victoria’s relationship with Mr Saladin. Yet the relationship with Julia expands Isolde’s horizons, and helps her to understand what her sister is experiencing.

But The Saxophone Teacher’s intervention is not benign. The Saxophone Teacher substitutes diagnosis for decorum in her relationships with her students, prying into their lives instead of merely encouraging their aptitudes. The girls’ school, Abbey Grange, is described as delivering a “forcible public fracture of their ego-mold in the interest of rebuilding a more versatile self” (177). The novel’s dominant schematic is that of the rehearsal as a rehearsal for life, not just for art; under neoliberalism, society demands that young people go through this rehearsal before they enter the world. As the rewards are potentially unlimited, so is the competition.

As in Tsiolkas’ Barracuda, society turns to the selective school as an alleged model of meritocracy, when in fact it embodies the age’s accelerating inequality. Like the school Danny Kelly attends in Barracuda – a boys-only school referred to in an invidious gender-reversal as Cunts College31 – Abbey Grange is a single-sex school. This might remove the distraction of heterosexual sex, but it also means the only real peer relationships at the school involve a struggle for social status. The relationship between Julia and Isolde, although it is the result of manipulation by The Saxophone Teacher, is at least partially owned by the young girls themselves; it allows them to imagine a different type of value amid the disheartening competition.

Although the novel is titled The Rehearsal, not The Audition, much of the story pertains to securing roles and performing them well, and the competitiveness of the students could be seen as a preview for the competitiveness of life under neoliberalism. This accords with Australian works I have already analysed, such as Barracuda, and some that I have not, such as Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro (1989) and Lally Katz’s play The Eisteddfod (2004), both of which show how society excites the competitiveness of young people in an age that treats artistic ability as another means of filtering winners from losers.

The resulting inhumanity is exemplified by Stanley’s father when, in a cruel joke, he urges Stanley to take out “a million-dollar insurance policy” on the student he considers most likely to die (33). Vulnerability is commoditised, reduced to a calculable risk. In Stanley’s father’s fantasy, the hypothetical suicide of a child is treated as just another vagary of what Ulrich Beck called risk society.32 Catton chronicles how contemporary adolescent life is hypercompetitive, and how this is exploited by a society that is forever searching for any sort of advantage in status.

Stanley lacks the personal turmoil exhibited by Isolde, his closest female counterpart. Around Stanley, however, our estimations of the other characters swirl. Mr Saladin is somewhat exonerated by the end of the book. There seems to have been a consensual element in his nonetheless unpardonable relationship with Victoria, and there is a slight suggestion that he may be the victim of political correctness. The fact that Mr Saladin is punished for his prurience while The Saxophone Teacher is not introduces a tacit critique of feminism, as in David Mamet’s Oleanna and Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. But, just as Christina Stead’s pre-feminism attracted many feminist exegetes, so Catton’s post-feminism speaks to the very sense of possibilities, of an expanded configuration of power and of knowledge, that feminism engendered.

New Zealand itself has historically provided a stage for rehearsals. It was among the first nations to embrace political modernity: giving the vote to women, adopting social welfare policies, and fostering a commitment to egalitarianism even in the late 1890s, when most of the world still held to laissez-faire policies. In the 1980s, New Zealand once again showed the way, but this time in a different direction, towards deregulation and free markets. Leigh Davis, a leading New Zealand avant-garde poet, in the mid-1980s became a merchant banker.33 The leftist, anti-nuclear policies of the Lange Labour government coincided with a pro-free-market economic stance epitomised by the “Rogernomics” of the government’s finance minister, Roger Douglas. All these developments disencumbered the rise of neoliberalism from party politics or even ideology, rendering visible the paradoxes of neoliberalism and how it infused an entire period rather than a particular political grouping. The Rehearsal shows the consequences of that paradox in the lives and personal choices of the children of the next generation.

Astrological Affections and an Improvised Town: Reading The Luminaries

Catton’s second novel continues her emphasis on group improvisation. Hokitika, the gold mining community on the west coast of the South Island in which The Luminaries is set, is an improvised town, a community generated at short notice and with little advance planning. It is kind of a dress rehearsal, or a performance with a great deal of spontaneity (as Australia of course had its own gold rush, earlier than New Zealand’s, an Australian component inevitably obtrudes on this novel, especially given the villain Carver’s convict past “in the Cockatoo Island Penitentiary”).34 Hokitika is an agglomeration of aspirants, escapees and nondescripts. It is the obverse of the artificial capital of Canberra as examined in Chapter 7: Hokitika was not built slowly, according to a blueprint, and designed as an ideal of public service, but is a ramshackle scaffolding for extracting minerals from the ground. If this sudden community seems neoliberal in its dedication to money, Catton’s point is that there is also a residually “settled” quality even in that improvisation. This settled quality bends forward to the peaceable quality of twentieth-century, socialist-egalitarian New Zealand. Catton, indeed, refers to the New Zealand gold rush as “strangely civilised”.35

In postcolonial writing, the historical novel frequently had a privileged role, as with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Historical fiction was a site of resistance, a place where histories ignored or travestied by imperial narratives could reassert themselves. The Canadian novelist Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptation of Big Bear (1973) recorded the resistance of the Cree against their white oppressors; Margaret Atwood’s poem “Marrying the Hangman” demonstrated the oppression of women within an already repressive colonial society. It was a Canadian, Linda Hutcheon, who theorised “historiographic metafiction” as a genre that is able to “situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction”.36 By 1998, however, Wayne Johnston’s Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a historical novel lamenting Newfoundland’s decision to join Canada in 1949 – a “Northeastern” novel, to extend MacLulich’s “Northern” category – was hailed by Luc Sante in the New York Times Book Review, who said of the novel’s Newfoundland setting:

The historical novel set in a remote place and time, once a force of resistance, was in danger of becoming a means of commodification. Stephen Muecke, for instance, saw Peter Carey’s penchant for the nineteenth century as evidence of a “conservative attitude to literature”.38

It was in this environment that one of the most internationally successful Australian historical novels, Roger McDonald’s Mr Darwin’s Shooter (1998), was published. It tells the story of Syms Covington, the cabin boy with Darwin on the HMS Beagle whose religious beliefs put him at odds with Darwin’s evolutionary views. In reviewing the novel, Pearl Bowman noted that, in the 1950s, the consensus had

It was not just that Darwin’s reputation had gone up, but that Freud’s and Marx’s had gone down. Marx came down, obviously, because of the collapse of communism; it took the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 to bring him back slightly, via the work of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Freud had only Slavoj Zizek to offer his reputation similar theoretical help, rendering Peter Carey’s rehabilitation of Freud through Ned Kelly, as discussed in Chapter 8, all the more timely. Freud’s reputation fell thanks to a more subtle range of factors, from psychologists turning to prescription medication over talk therapy as a way to solve individuals’ problems to attacks on Freud, ostensibly from the left, that served the interests of the right by eliminating any irrationalism in the human spirit and making mankind into simply Homo economicus. Darwin, on the other hand, was associated with the survival of the fittest. Indeed, much of neoliberal anthropology was simply a revived Social Darwinism, even if, at its more compassionate edges, it redefined that fight for survival as what Honneth termed the struggle for recognition, making it less biological and more attidunal, no longer about the survival of the fittest but the comparative social advantage of the fittest.

Yet, even so, McDonald’s novel was not seen as an uncritical, progressive celebration of Darwinian thought. McDonald’s portrait of Covington as a man of religious faith appalled by what he has helped Darwin to assert is laden with an ambiguous sympathy for Covington as a believer, as McDonald acknowledged.40 If one sees Darwinism as a precursor to neoliberal selfishness, one can see the spirituality of Covington as palliating the exploitative excesses of neoliberalism. But if one sees Darwin as an emblem of progress – the one progressive figure left standing after the statues of Marx and Freud had been hurled to the ground – the affirmation of Covington’s religiosity functions as a tribute to the vestigial. Historical fictions, in this light, are histories of the present as well as the past, far from affirming a residual sovereignty. John Marx describes the historical novel as a “prehistory for globalisation that is also an origin story for … global meritocracy”.41 Catton’s novel, with its emphasis on money, luck and individual autonomy, and its setting amid a resource boom at the peak of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism, could be such an origin story.

The plot organisation of The Luminaries is reminiscent of Edwardian novels and of genre fiction. The group of collaborators who oscillate between sinister and benign ends is reminiscent both of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and Agatha Christie’s quasi-parody of Chesterton, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929). Catton has admitted to reading Agatha Christie and quoted Chesterton extensively on her Twitter feed in August 2014, so it is plausible to suggest that these are conscious intertextualities.42 Both Christie’s and Chesterton’s novels have to do with secret conspiracies, yet totally upend the reader’s initial evaluation of the characters. Catton similarly offers a series of surprises in her plot, not just with respect to who was where and did what but as to the essential moral qualities of the major characters. There is mobility and indeterminacy in these rapid permutations and inversions – a sense that destinies are not fixed for anyone. That the politician Alistair Lauderbeck, who turns out to be the villain of the book, thinks (wrongly) that Francis Carver, the villain of the book, was Crosbie Wells’ brother – the son of the same mother, just as Lauderbeck himself and Wells are, actually, the sons of the same father – indicates the close apposition between the respectable and the disrespectable, the heroic and the contumacious, that such an improvised locality as Hokitika can disgorge. Indeed, much of the novel’s moral drama lies in its exposure of the hypocrisy of those who might be thought to represent ideals, such as Reverend Devlin, who conceals secret financial documents between the pages of the Old and New Testaments in his Bible, and the virtue of those who might be thought corrupt, such as the opium-taking whore, Anna Wetherell.

A Kaleidscopic Cast

The business tycoon Dick Mannering is just the sort of entrepreneurial figure that could be, but often is not, represented in contemporary fiction, for reasons ranging from Forrester’s logic that neoliberalism does not want itself actively represented, to a tendency to depict a more diffuse sense of power, as in Winton’s Eyrie. But the narrative, although it does not make Mannering a villain, puts him on a par with everyone else in the kaleidoscopic cast in that he is a creature of the stars, or a plaything of happenstance. Even if there is “no charity in a gold town” (696), the novel ultimately breaks through to a realisation of the insufficiency of greed as a human motive. But it does so subtly. Rather than being either lionised or demonised, Mannering and his wealth are simply part of the picture, and his financial strength does not overpower the moral strength of others in the ensemble. As the Chinese indentured labourer and gold miner Quee Long says, “All the prestige and the profit belong to the whoremonger, not to the whore” (324). Catton can hardly be said to have written a paean to capitalism. This is both because her sympathies are clearly otherwise and because The Luminaries has a complicated structure that does not privilege any one voice. That so much of the first part of the book is devoted to one-on-one encounters between two people, in which characters both reveal and conceal themselves, adds to this effect of potentially infinite recombination. Quee Long measures everything by “a private standard of perfection” (258). This is a standard that potentially commands all the characters, but which no one else but Quee Long can ever know. Desire for money operates as a major motivation in the book, but it is asymmetrical and variegated. Catton does not reduce her characters to a uniform Homo economicus, but explores what John Scheckter calls “multiple systems of analysis and evaluation” beyond the merely financial.43

Lydia Wells, the opportunistic widow of the slain Crosbie, whose gold is the pivot about which the novel revolves, puts eloquently the novel’s unwillingness to endorse unfettered liberty as the solution to the vexations of the human condition: “I find it very wonderful that you should protest a life of virtue and austerity, in favour of – what did you call them – ‘freedoms’. Freedoms to do what exactly?” (560). Lydia goes on to defend Victorian proprieties, which the novel in part subverts, as if to say that true liberty will combine nineteenth-century economics and twenty-first-century mores. Yet the novel elevates an interdependent individualism over both authoritarian deference and narcissistic self-aggrandisement. The Luminaries has an important nonfictional source, acknowledged by Catton, in Stevan Eldred-Grigg, who has bucked the majority New Zealand tradition by writing of the rich and the gentry, which could be seen as both violating twentieth-century statist egalitarianism and calling attention to the inequalities it did not smooth out. But Eldred-Grigg’s Diggers, Hatters, Whores is a much more linear book than Catton’s.44 It no doubt gave her a sense of the possible inventory of characters, yet is quite different in tonality and shape to The Luminaries. Eldred-Grigg’s book does, however, share with The Luminaries an irreverence towards the New Zealand tradition of literary self-effacement and national self-scrutiny.

The Luminaries has been called a neo-Victorian novel.45 Before the modernist privileging of the récit, and in a time of frequent serialisation, narratives were longer, and most major Victorian novels are indeed long and plot-driven, as is Catton’s. Yet a comparison with the early twentieth-century detective story, as considered in relation to Chesterton and Christie above, may be more illuminating than a strictly Victorian connection. Catton makes Stead’s idea of the “many-charactered novel” look like the most bare-bones testimonio by comparison. Critics have likened The Luminaries to Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) – the multiple points of view, the complicated plot, the opium theme. But Collins, although he played with the reader’s expectations, was not nearly as metafictive as Catton is, and The Luminaries represents the integration of the self-consciousness of Tristram Shandy into a nineteenth-century formal realism that, even in sensation writers such as Collins, Rhoda Broughton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, rejected any obvious foregrounding of authorial presence. The novel’s ensemble cast, not clearly divided into major and minor characters, is a hallmark of the twentieth-century detective story, much more so than of Victorian fiction. The book’s temporal setting is Victorian, but its affective life-situation cannot be neatly pigeonholed. Catton has said that she avoids novels that claim to represent New Zealand as a whole,46 and The Luminaries is not a totalising, magic-realist blockbuster as was Carey’s Illywhacker, Ireland’s The Chosen or Hall’s Just Relations. The Luminaries, for all its size, is concentrated.

Catton features a multicultural cast, including not one but two Chinese characters who are deliberately antithetical to the insidious opium-peddling stereotype of Victorian fiction. Catton’s Chinese characters can be seen as a fulfilment of the promise of earlier characters, such as the Chinese camp chef Cheon in Jeannie Gunn’s We of the Never-Never (1903), who contained elements of both racial caricature and three-dimensional portrait. There is also the character of Te Rau Tauwhare, a Māori pounamu (greenstone) aficionado, the Jew Benjamin Löwenthal and the Scandinavian Harald Nilssen. Even the minister, Devlin, has an Irish name, although he is Protestant. There is an additional historical touch in Löwenthal’s background, as he is said to be from the former kingdom of Hanover, which was absorbed by Prussia in 1866 (315). Hanover was associated with the British royal family, and only passed out of British dominion when Queen Victoria took the throne, because Hanoverian sovereignty required male succession. Its absorption by Prussia foreshadowed later tensions between Britain and Germany, and Löwenthal’s emigration as a result of these events anticipates the far greater diaspora of the 1930s under Nazism. Several times in the book, Catton drops hints like these to show the reader that her sense of history is not innocent; the book is not simply a light-hearted romp but understands the ethical consequences of historical events.

Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Julie Hakim Azzma noted that: 

Yet the untranslated Bible verses in Māori, read by Reverend Devlin, are a challenge to readers not from New Zealand. Reverend Devlin’s realisation that he should not cavil at the Bible being translated into Māori, as his own Bible is also a translation, serves to remind the reader that literacy migrated to the West from other languages and cultures and may migrate again. The Māori Tauwhare delivers the decisive blow to the villain Carver. Emery Staines buries the missing gold in Māori land. These plot developments position indigeneity as a force that can withstand and anneal the ultimately trivial contestations of capitalism. It is not a spiritual fullness, perhaps, but an ethical horizon consistent with the thematic of concern I discussed in Chapter 6 with respect to Gail Jones, Alex Miller and Alexis Wright. The structural parallels between pounamu and gold, as commodities at once comparable and incomparable, reveal a level of engagement with Māori themes in the work that is more than superficial multiculturalism.

As for the Chinese characters, Catton introduces two, Quee Long and Ah Sook, and she makes Westerners’ inability to tell them apart a linchpin of the plot. It is not anachronistic to depict Chinese people in New Zealand in this period. As in the United States and Australia, the first people of the Chinese diaspora came during the gold rushes. Restrictive and discriminatory government policies, and paranoia about an Asian invasion, kept the numbers in all three countries below what they might have been, but it was the beginning of a migration that the White Australia Policy could not staunch. Often, twenty-first-century students are told that multiculturalism, for good or ill, is a present-day development. It is good for them to see, in Catton’s book, that it has a longer history. Catton’s depiction of the two Chinese men is thus neither anachronistic nor politically correct. In the most literal sense it is a history lesson.

Gold and Love

The gender politics of The Luminaries were not much commented on in reviews, but are worth considering. The key image of the book is of the missing gold being sewn into Anna Wetherell’s dresses. That the gold has to be concealed in a woman’s clothing represents a notable overturning of gender hierarchies. Furthermore, the world of the book is decidedly, even disturbingly, male-dominated. There are really only two major female characters, Lydia Wells and Anna Wetherell. Yet there are so many nearly interchangeable men, all defined by their professions, somewhat like the adults in The Rehearsal. Some of this has to do with the book’s sources in Chestertonian conspiracy and the highly homosocial world of that sort of plot. Kirsty Gunn was wrong to say that The Rehearsal was about a group of teenage girls.48 Yet, with the exception of Anna and Lydia, The Luminaries is about blokes. Catton even gives her own astrological sign, Libra (she was born on 24 September, 1985), to a man and, at that, an inconspicuous and not all that positively portrayed one, Harald Nilsson. This forestalls any possibility for the reader to identify an authorial surrogate in the book.

Anna reflects at one point, “A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past” (825). That The Luminaries does indeed give Anna a future shows how Catton is, without flinching from historical reality, giving her characters a utopian space. This space is utopian even, and perhaps especially, in twenty-first-century terms; it is a space in which they can find respite from the forces of the market, which values men and women’s futures so differently. Furthermore, in a historical novel this gendering of temporality, of past and future, has that much more valence. Emery’s willingness to exonerate Anna Wetherell of both the charges against her and the social stigma of her past has an egalitarian effect. It permits Anna to exercise her legal rights as a citizen and not to be preyed upon by a society that has designated her a loser.

The Luminaries is not only compassionate towards the victims of such potential derogations, but actively encourages and solicits their agency, at least within their various astrologically prescribed fates. The haunting series of letters written by the illegitimate Crosbie Wells to his legitimate half-brother Lauderbeck, which never receive a response yet are kept immaculately by their recipient, signifies some sort of failed communication or missed appointment, undergirded by structural hierarchies about who is valuable and who is not. That Lauderbeck comes to regret his indifference when he sees what he presumes is Crosbie’s dead body provides, if not the actuality or the sentimentality of reconciliation, at least a conceptual affirmation of such, one which does not accept the severance of socially acceptable and unacceptable as a given. That Crosbie himself genuinely vowed to reform (as seen in his final letter to Lauderbeck), and that it is Te Rau Tauwhare who kills Carver, in an act of spiritual retribution, puts the novel’s values on the side of the Māori and not of the Anglo-capitalists. The literal and metaphorical resurrection of Emery Staines through his altruistic gesture on behalf of Anna is also a resurrection of a sort of social possibility. Anna and Emery make sacrifices for each other that are not driven by avarice or hope of gain. The Luminaries does not say that greed is good.

Why then, despite the popularity of the novel, is there an undercurrent of doubt about its merits among some readers? The doyen of New Zealand men of letters, C. K. Stead, writing for an international audience in the Financial Times, summed this feeling up when he said, “The history of literary fiction in the twentieth century was a struggle, never entirely successful, to escape from this kind of writing.”49 In this view, the modernist commitment to austere, self-aware récits represented a high-water mark in artistic control that is being abandoned by the younger generation with its heedless indulgence in pop culture and recycling. Yet one could counter that modernism, like any period, had to end sometime, and the paralysis of late modernity in the work of Christina Stead and Harrower indicates why. Furthermore, as C. K. Stead himself observes, the modernist rejection of “this kind of writing” was “never entirely successful”. The major Australian writers of the mid-twentieth century – Christina Stead, Patrick White and Xavier Herbert – did not escape from conventional narrative. Yet Randolph Stow’s work was possibly inhibited by an excessive adhesion to modernist mandates that kept his books short, spare and symbolic. The same could be said of another Western Australian writer, Peter Cowan. In New Zealand, the two best prose writers of this era, Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson, stuck to modernist conventions, albeit imbuing them with far riskier sexualities and mentalities than the male, heterosexual norm presumed by such modernist writers as William Faulkner, James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.

C. K. Stead’s preferred model of high-modernist elitism had its costs. Twentieth-century writers such as Tolkien and Christie and even Chesterton, all alluded to or evoked in varying ways by The Luminaries, were underrated in their lifetimes because they were bestselling, sought to entertain, or were not doctrinally aligned with Bloomsbury and other high-modern cliques.50 If the floodgates of quality are now burst too wide open, it is because the synchronic paralysis of late modernity dammed them in too much. To play on Harrower’s titles, the watch tower was too vigilant, the long prospect too distant; inevitably, the objects of surveillance asserted themselves. Catton’s generation believes that one can be both impure and high-literary; C. K. Stead’s that to be high-literary a threshold of purity is needed. The answer, as with the economic policies of late modernity and neoliberalism, is somewhere in between. But it is the apposition that is interesting.

The concept of the “systems novel”, first mentioned by Thomas LeClair in his 1988 book on Don DeLillo, is relevant to Catton’s work, and may be a way to wring The Luminaries out of the debate over the historical novel cited above.51 Catton synthesises the patterned, game-playing novel with the realist-psychological novel. Her employment of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” philosophy plays out in the way the characters in the novel ultimately affirm ideals of sacrifice and idealism seen in Buber’s call for thoroughgoing commitment to the other.52 This affirmation is seen in Te Rua Tauwhare’s pounamu, Anna and Emery’s love, and in Lauderbeck’s realisation of his love for his half-brother Crosbie and his appreciation of Crosbie’s renunciation of covetousness and embrace of a more humanistic way of life. Some might see the emplacement of Buber’s “I and Thou” theme, with its call for profound, committed interpersonal engagement, in such an arcade of ingenuities as a dilution, as if personal depth were being outsourced. But in suggesting that we should care about and love one another, The Luminaries avoids sentimentality and didacticism by lacing its message through complex imaginative structures.

C. K. Stead, despite gently poking at some of modernism’s vulnerable points – such as its cosiness with fascism, in his 2001 novella The Secret History of Modernism – is in essence a defender of modernism. Yet if The Luminaries is not modernist in Stead’s sense of the term, neither is it ephemeral fluff. It is a serious meditation on chance, fate and action. The name of the barque Godspeed, whose wreck is one of the principal surprises in the narrative, combines luck and destiny. Its catastrophe expresses the surprises life has in store even for those entities whose course seems prefigured. The novel is full of narrative surprises. The enunciating characters do not necessarily turn out to be the main characters. For the latecomer Walter Moody, the entire book is a rehearsal. The Luminaries is lengthy and about money at its beginning; brief and about love at its end. A smaller, more meaningful book is hidden within a larger, more diffuse one.

C. K. Stead dismisses the astrological structure of The Luminaries in a sentence. But the astrological frame, by suggesting that each character’s actions and decisions are determined by the time when they happened to be born, in its denial of agency, its insistence that much of human character and life is forewritten, and in the inherent difficulty its understanding imposes, is an important corrective to the unremitting voluntarism of the neoliberal mind. The astrological frame at the novel’s heart, the way each character’s motives and psychology are systematically linked to their astrological sign, anchors the book. Astrology may seem to be trivial: a parlour game at best, a fetish at worst. A 1984 special issue of Partisan Review devoted to contemporary theory invoked Stanley Fish’s term “off the wall” to argue that a Christian or a psychoanalytic reading of Jane Austen would be “on the wall”, an astrological one “off the wall”.53 Only the small remaining band of Jungian psychoanalytic critics took astrology seriously as an interpretive mode.54 But Catton’s foregrounding of astrology enables her to be at once mainstream and non-Western. Astrology, with its fatalistic, non-messianic tincture and Babylonian origin, is, like paganism in Kent’s Burial Rites, a reminder of the presence of the non-normative and the only semi-Western. In its intricate yet (to outsiders) arbitrary patterns, astrology has an element of the stochastic that can make it seem modern and experimental.

The way astrology is deployed in the novel also suggests a tacit relationship to the idea of history. The horoscope begins with Aries, the oncoming (Northern Hemisphere) of spring, and ends with Pisces, the very last of winter’s cold. “What was glimpsed in Aquarius – what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned is made, in Pisces, manifest” (531). Pisces, in late February and early March, comes after Aquarius, in late January and early February. But, as Catton well knows, in the overall cycle of the zodiac entailed by the precession of the equinoxes, Aries precedes Pisces, which in turns precedes Aquarius – as the world learned in the 1960s, when hippies and new-age mystics spoke of the Age of Aquarius as the dawning of a more enlightened age. Catton sets her book in the last vestiges of the Age of Pisces (said to be roughly from the time of Christ to 2000). On the micro level, time goes forward; on the macro level, backward. Catton’s intricate structure, as much as it makes reading the book a kind of role-playing game, circuitously yields provocative intellectual value. Of course, the entire scheme is built around the Northern Hemisphere sky and seasons; by setting the novel in New Zealand, Catton critiques and redeploys these norms. The stars are not the same everywhere.

The very idea of “The Luminaries” suggests neoliberalism’s potential to bring inefficiencies to light. Yet the way the characters aligned with the seven planets, who are generally more important, offset the characters aligned with the twelve astrological signs, who are generally more minor, lends a sense of counterpoint to this ghastly clarity: a pluralistic insistence that no one ideology or cultural formation will carry the day. The planets move, unlike the stars, and have names, such as Venus, that allegorise concrete human characteristics. Astrology may also testify to non-European influences the novel will not notably appropriate but can inconspicuously and subtly mine. If astrology is no more equivalent to Māori cosmology than gold is to pounamu, at least the apposition, both inadequate and suggestive, is there. Astrology’s appeal is that it is precisely, at this point in time, no longer what Felski, Marcus and Best would call symptomatic: it goes deeper than the surface.

When we first meet Walter Moody, he is an inexperienced whelp, what Pierre Bourdieu termed an oblate, somebody seeking to enter the system, and in this case to make substantial income on the goldfields. Although he is an Englishman travelling in New Zealand, in structural terms he resembles the scores of young antipodeans, both authors and the characters in their books, who have gone to the metropolitan worlds of the Northern Hemisphere to make their progress, or, as it were, luck. Catton describes him as “not superstitious”, not because he is jaded but because he is inexperienced: he has assumed, as a default mode, a superficial canniness, a trust in “suspicion, cynicism, probability” (18). In the course of the book, Moody not only discovers a more spiritual aspect to life, but also acknowledges that his involvement with the other conspirators leads him to be “associated? Involved? Entangled?” – the tentativeness provided by the question marks is key here – with forces, animate and inanimate, beyond his own personal aspirations (350). For the characters in The Luminaires as in Eleanor Catton’s own career, the world is made of more than just careers. Walter Moody goes from the goldfields to prospecting upon what the 1850s Australian critic Frederick Sinnett called the fiction fields.55 For those determined not to like Catton’s novel, the enveloping of Walter in a larger affective network may be but a tantalising game. But to those looking to what The Luminaries can offer rather than what it lacks, the book’s occult aspects might be a token of a future far beyond winners and losers.

The first step towards this future, however, is to own up to what we face, not to deny it. One of Australia’s least polemical but most humane poets, Vivian Smith, Tasmanian-born but long resident in Sydney, has said this with exemplary integrity:

Smith calls his poem “In Dürftiger Zeit”, meaning “fallow time” in German. Writing in 2007, at the age of seventy-four, Smith seems convinced that these years are indeed a fallow time in Australian life, with the very earth in peril and any response seemingly ineffectual. The only token of hope here is the enunciation itself. Here we have a voice that tapers rancour with concern. Beneath the poem’s bitter surface, there is an abiding idealism. Moreover, as evidenced in the sophistication of the title and language, there is a conviction that transnationalism and cosmopolitanism do not mean selling out to the market. Instead, they are the possible channels for a more humane and considerate ethic. A transnational and cosmopolitan outlook can yet resist a flattening of value into economics, or a surrender to a reductive consensus. Smith’s poem conveys a history of the present that, as in the novels of Kent and Catton, points us to the hope of a world not yet dead.