Eleanor Catton: The Luminaries

The stellar and planetary positions in this book have been determined astronomically. This is to say that we acknowledge the celestial phenomenon known as precession , by which motion the vernal equinox, the astrological equivalent of the Greenwich meridian, has come to shift. The vernal equinox (autumnal in southern latitudes) formerly occurred while the Sun was in the constellation of Aries, the first sign. It now occurs while the Sun is in Pisces, the twelfth. Consequently, and as readers of this book will note, each zodiacal sign ‘occurs’ approximately one month later than popular information would have it. We mean no disrespect to popular information by this correction; we do observe, however, that the above error is held in defiance of the material fact of our nineteenth-century firmament; and we dare to conjecture, further, that such a conviction might be called Piscean in its quality—emblematic, indeed, of persons born during the Age of Pisces , an age of mirrors, tenacity, instinct, twinship, and hidden things. We are contented by this notion. It further affirms our faith in the vast and knowing influence of

the infinite sky.

Te Rau Tauwhare, a greenstone hunter

Charlie Frost, a banker

Benjamin Löwenthal, a newspaperman

Edgar Clinch, an hotelier

Dick Mannering, a goldfields magnate

Quee Long, a goldsmith

Harald Nilssen, a commission merchant

Joseph Pritchard, a chemist

Thomas Balfour, a shipping agent

Aubert Gascoigne, a justice’s clerk

Sook Yongsheng, a hatter

Cowell Devlin, a chaplain

Walter Moody

Lydia (Wells) Carver, née Greenway

Francis Carver

Alistair Lauderback

George Shepard

Anna Wetherell

Emery Staines

Crosbie Wells

The Wells Cottage (Arahura Valley)

The Reserve Bank (Revell-street)

The West Coast Times Office (Weld-street)

The Gridiron Hotel (Revell-street)

The Aurora Goldmine (Kaniere)

‘Chinatown Forge’ (Kaniere)

Nilssen & Co. (Gibson Quay)

The Opium Den (Kaniere)

Godspeed (a barque, reg. Port Chalmers)

Hokitika Courthouse (Magistrate’s Court)

The Wayfarer’s Fortune (Revell-street)

Hokitika Gaol (Seaview)

Reason

Desire

Force

Command

Restriction

Outermost (formerly Innermost)

Innermost (formerly Outermost)

(deceased)

In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika; a secret council is disturbed; Walter Moody conceals his most recent memory; and Thomas Balfour begins to tell a story.

The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met. From the variety of their comportment and dress—frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill—they might have been twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed, the studied isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to take his shot at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily silence that occurs, late in the evening, on a public railway—deadened here not by the slur and clunk of the coaches, but by the fat clatter of the rain.

Such was the perception of Mr. Walter Moody, from where he stood in the doorway with his hand upon the frame. He was innocent of having disturbed any kind of private conference, for the speakers had ceased when they heard his tread in the passage; by the time he opened the door, each of the twelve men had resumed his occupation (rather haphazardly, on the part of the billiard players, for they had forgotten their places) with such a careful show of absorption that no one even glanced up when he stepped into the room.

The strictness and uniformity with which the men ignored him might have aroused Mr. Moody’s interest, had he been himself in body and temperament. As it was, he was queasy and disturbed. He had known the voyage to West Canterbury would be fatal at worst, an endless rolling trough of white water and spume that ended on the shattered graveyard of the Hokitika bar, but he had not been prepared for the particular horrors of the journey, of which he was still incapable of speaking, even to himself. Moody was by nature impatient of any deficiencies in his own person—fear and illness both turned him inward—and it was for this reason that he very uncharacteristically failed to assess the tenor of the room he had just entered.

Moody’s natural expression was one of readiness and attention. His grey eyes were large and unblinking, and his supple, boyish mouth was usually poised in an expression of polite concern. His hair inclined to a tight curl; it had fallen in ringlets to his shoulders in his youth, but now he wore it close against his skull, parted on the side and combed flat with a sweet-smelling pomade that darkened its golden hue to an oily brown. His brow and cheeks were square, his nose straight, and his complexion smooth. He was not quite eight-and-twenty, still swift and exact in his motions, and possessed of the kind of roguish, unsullied vigour that conveys neither gullibility nor guile. He presented himself in the manner of a discreet and quick-minded butler, and as a consequence was often drawn into the confidence of the least voluble of men, or invited to broker relations between people he had only lately met. He had, in short, an appearance that betrayed very little about his own character, and an appearance that others were immediately inclined to trust.

Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck’s Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied—for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one’s arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction—but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.