The Luminaries

“Hokitika was growing faster than San Francisco, the papers said, and out of nothing…out of the ancient rotting life of the jungle…out of the tidal marshes and the shifting gullies and the fog…out of sly waters, rich in ore. Here the men were not self-made; they were self-making, as they squatted in the dirt to wash it clean.”

In this quote, Thomas Balfour reflects the conventional European notion of Class Mobility on the Colonial Frontier. He sees Hokitika as a place where people can escape the circumstances of their birth and become wealthy. He thinks of the colonial project as one that is transforming the land from “the ancient rotting life of the jungle” into a “clean,” civilized territory rich in wealth and potential.

“In this way Aubert Gascoigne, born out of wedlock to an English governess, raised in the attics of Parisian row-houses, clothed always in cast-offs, forever banished to the coal scuttle, by turns admonished and ignored, had risen, over time, to become a personage of limited but respectable means. He had escaped his past—and yet he could be called neither an ambitious man, nor an unduly lucky one.”

Gascoigne is representative of one of the men who are able to forge a new life for themselves on the colonial frontier in Hokitika. He is not “unduly lucky,” which suggests that he had a hand in his own circumstances rather than it being the result of fate. However, the use of the astral chart motif suggests that his fate—like those of the other characters in the novel—was in fact determined by the stars.

“Clinch’s efforts in love were always of a mothering sort, for it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive, and it was a mother that Edgar Clinch most craved—his own having died in his infancy, and since then been resurrected as a goddess of shining virtue in his mind, a goddess whose face was as a blurred shape, seen through a window on a night of fog.”

Clinch is one of the men who is attracted to Anna but, in a reflection of Patriarchal Objectification and Control of Women, he does not see her as a full person but rather as a type of symbol. This is similar to the way he conceives of his own idealized mother. His memory of his mother is not of a real person but of “a goddess of shining virtue,” though he does not really see her clearly as her “face was as a blurred shape” since this version of his mother is entirely fabricated and never existed.

“‘Gentlemen,’ (though this collective address sat oddly, considering the mixed company in the room) ‘I contend that there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths—and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective. I do not believe that any one of you has perjured himself in any way tonight. I trust that you have given me the truth, and nothing but the truth. But your perspectives are very many, and you will forgive me if I do not take your tale for something whole.’”

The extensive use of narratives from the different characters’ points of view— characters who are known to lie for their own motivations—makes it very difficult to determine the “whole truth” of the events that occur. This quote from Moody, who is an impartial listener, makes it clear that they are unreliable narrators with their own personal stakes in the story.

“‘In this matter I am the expert, and you are the layman,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘You ought to remember that—no matter your poor opinion of realms.’

Her arm was extended between them limply, as a lady extends her rings to be kissed, and Gascoigne repressed the urge to snatch it up, and kiss it.”

Despite her charlatanry, Lydia has a sincere belief in the zodiac and the occult. The men find these supernatural notions hard to believe. This scene depicts Gascoigne’s patriarchal attitude toward Lydia; Gascoigne does not believe in her expertise and is instead more interested in indulging in his desire for her as an object.

“Disembarking the packet steamer that had conveyed him from Liverpool to Dunedin, he had cast his gaze skyward, and had felt for the first time the strangeness of where he was. The skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the Pole Star beneath his feet, quite swallowed. […] It was as if the ancient patterns had no meaning here.”

The constellations in New Zealand are different from those found in the Northern Hemisphere. For Moody, recently arrived from the United Kingdom, this new view of the stars makes him realize how far away he is from things that are familiar to him. The new stars are also emblematic of how people like Moody come from Europe to New Zealand to find new fates, which are different from the destinies written in the stars back home.

“Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become wilful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood—it acquires all the qualities of common superstition—and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.”

Though the men gathered at the Crown Hotel do not believe in Lydia’s notions of the zodiac and otherworldliness, they nonetheless find themselves caught up in a “common superstition” of their own—their superstition about what caused the events of January 14. The quote goes on to describe how, regardless of their beliefs, the men are subject to control and “influence” by the movements of the celestial bodies, as shown in the motif of the astral charts.

“A whore is the very mistress of persuasion, just as a sibyl must be persuasive, if she is to be believed…and you must not forget that beauty and conviction are always persuasive, whatever the context in which they appear.”

In this quote, Gascoigne draws a connection between the work of the sibyl and that of a sex worker. A sibyl is a figure from Greek mythology who has the gift of prophesy. However, due to Gascoigne’s patriarchal ideas, he does not take Anna’s powers seriously.

“As the conjugal act cannot be spoken of aloud for reasons both sacred and profane, the ritual of the pipe was, for the pair of them, a holy ritual that was unspeakable and mortified, just as it was ecstatic and divine: its sacredness lay in its very profanity, and its profanity, in its sacred form.”

Sook does not have sex with Anna, but that does not mean he does not desire her. In this quote, he draws a connection between their practice of smoking opium together and the “conjugal act.”

“The sum total had been stolen from Crosbie Wells; he had been the one to make a strike on the fields at Dunstan, as his correspondence had attested! So Lydia Wells had betrayed Wells’s secret to Francis Carver, with whose help she had then devised a plan to steal Wells’s fortune and blackmail Lauderback, leaving the pair of them rich, and the proud possessors of the barque Godspeed, into the bargain.”

When Moody reads Crosbie’s unanswered letters to Lauderback, he finally understands the entire conspiracy in which Lauderback, Carver, Crosbie, and Lydia were tied up. He is disgusted and shocked to finally get to the bottom of what Lydia and Carver have been doing, which is part of his motivation for representing Anna and Staines in court later.

“‘Do you have an interest in the occult, Mr. Moody?’—a question which Moody could not answer honestly without risking offence.

He paused only a moment, however, before replying, ‘There are many things that are yet arcane to me, Mrs. Wells, and I hope that I am a curious man; if I am interested in those truths that are yet unknown, it is only so that they might, in time, be made known—or, to put it more plainly, so that in time, I might come to know them.’”

Moody, as a stand-in for a detective in this novel of mysteries, attempts to rigorously adhere to logic and avoid superstition. He desires to know things in order to understand them. However, like the reader, although he learns many things, there are key understandings that remain elusive to him, such as what exactly happened to Staines on the night he disappeared.

“What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end.”

This quote explicates how the zodiac signs relate to the actions of the characters. However, the language is intentionally vague, which makes it unclear if the collective noun “we” refers to the celestial bodies that astrologically control human actions or if it refers to humanity as a whole, in which case human beings have the power to control their choices and destiny. This passage says that, in Part 3, the events only Anna knew through her visions will finally become clear to everyone.

“She stood unmoving for a moment, gathering confidence, and then, in one fluid motion, she went to the widow’s writing desk, laid the deed of gift upon the table, uncorked a pot of ink, picked up Mrs. Wells’s pen, wet the nib in the inkwell, leaned forward, and wrote: Emery Staines.

Anna had never seen Emery Staines’s signature before, but she knew without a doubt that she had replicated the form of it exactly.”

Anna is functionally illiterate. While she can read slowly, she is not capable of writing well, and later in the novel, during her trial, it comes out that she usually signs her contracts with just an “X.” However, here, she is able to accurately forge Emery Staines’s signature, despite having never seen it before. This shows that she and Staines have a special, astrological connection between them and they are able to supernaturally transmit information to each other.

“It’s the nature of indenture, I’m afraid, that you sign away your luck. Every chance to get lucky, you sign away.”

In this statement from Mannering to Quee, the limitations of Class Mobility on the Colonial Frontier become clear. While European men like Mannering become wealthy off the labor of others, those who are colonized, like the Chinese Quee, are forced into impoverished circumstances and have no real chance of upward mobility.

“As for the length of the girl’s leash, 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? Freedom to fraternise with those very men who once defiled and abused her? Freedom to smoke herself senseless in a Chinaman’s saloon?”

This statement by Lydia to Devlin highlights the limited options available to women like Anna in the patriarchal culture of the frontier. Lydia is dismissive of the idea of freedom because she believes that there is no real freedom possible for Anna.

“‘You have a feeling that Mr. Staines is somewhere inland, and that he is alive.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I can’t give you any details. I know it’s somewhere muddy. Or leafy. Somewhere near water, only it isn’t the beach. The water’s quick-moving. Over stones…You see: as soon as I try and put it into words, it trips away from me.’”

Anna tells Devlin that she has had supernatural premonitions or messages from Staines. This confirms Gascoigne’s association of her with a sibyl that occurred earlier in the text. Her visions imply that Staines is not hiding out at Sook’s, as he later claims in court, but rather that he is near the Arahura River near Crosbie’s cottage.

“He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem.

So they are lovers, he thought, looking down at them. So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping.”

Devlin is one of the only characters besides Lydia who recognizes the true connection between Staines and Anna. His language here, describing them as “mirrored bodies,” is reflected in the astral charts, where Staines and Anna are represented as the Moon and the Sun, until they swap positions about halfway through the narrative.

“‘Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.’ He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. ‘Especially the company of one other soul,’ he added, turning back to the sea.”

When Anna and Staines meet, they appear to have an instant connection. Even before Lydia says that they may be “astral soul-mates” (716), Staines alludes to this idea himself by describing Anna’s presence as “the company of one other soul.”

“Following their reunion, Anna’s health began to improve almost at once. Her wrists and forearms thickened, her face lost its pinched, starved quality, and the colour returned to her cheeks.”

The psychic connection between Anna and Staines is reflected in the fact that Anna’s health improves quickly once they are reunited; previously, she was drastically losing weight, which mirrored Staines’s own lack of food when he was locked away in the shipping container. However, the novel leaves this open to interpretation, as Anna’s improvement could also simply be attributed to her joy at being reunited with her lover.

“His memory of that period was very incomplete, made up, as far as Devlin could tell, of dream-like impressions, sensations, and snatches of light. He could not remember boarding a ship, and nor could he remember a shipwreck—though he seemed to recall being washed up on the beach, coughing seawater, both arms wrapped around a cask of salt beef. He remembered approaching Crosbie Wells’s cottage; he remembered passing a party of diggers, sitting around a fire; he remembered leaves and running water; he remembered the rotten hull of an abandoned canoe, and a steep-sided gorge, and the red eye of a weka; he remembered nightly dreams about the patterns of the Tarot, and gold-lined corsets, and a fortune in a flour sack, hidden beneath a bed.”

This passage is the closest the novel ever comes to describing exactly what happened to Staines after he went missing on January 14. While he does not remember being on the boat, he does remember washing up on the beach, perhaps after the Godspeed capsizes. This quote also shows that, like Anna’s visions of Staines’s experiences, Staines, too, has visions of the events in Anna’s life; Lydia was teaching Anna the “patterns of the Tarot,” which Staines somehow recalls. Similarly, Staines remembers “a fortune in a flour sack, hidden beneath a bed,” which is a reference to the gold from Anna’s dress hidden under Gascoigne’s bed.

“A more worldly soul than Anna might have formed an immediate conclusion from the scene that greeted her: the heavy lace curtains; the redundant upholstery; the heady scent of liquor and perfume; the beaded portiere, currently tied back against the doorframe to show the dimly lit bedchamber beyond. But Anna was not worldly, and if she was surprised to encounter a scene of such sweet-smelling, cushioned luxury at a boarding house for girls, she did not express it aloud.”

In this quote, the extent of Anna’s innocence upon her arrival in New Zealand becomes clear. She does not realize initially that Lydia is running a brothel, as implied by the décor. Anna’s early innocence is in contrast with her later cynicism about her work.

“When Mrs. Wells dismissed her she flew to the boudoir, went to her bureau, pulled the stopper from the decanter of laudanum-laced whisky and drank straight from the neck, in two desperate, wretched slugs. Then she threw herself upon her bed, and sobbed until the opiate took effect.”

In this quote, it becomes clear how Anna became addicted to opium. She uses it to handle her feelings of grief and despair after sleeping with Lydia’s husband, Crosbie, and becoming pregnant with his child.

“‘I have always considered,’ he said at last, ‘that there is a great deal of difference between keeping one’s own secret, and keeping a secret for another soul; so much so that I wish we had two words, that is, a word for a secret of one’s own making, and a word for a secret that one did not make, and perhaps did not wish for, but has chosen to keep, all the same. I feel the same about love; that there is a world of difference between the love that one gives—or wants to give—and the love that one desires, or receives.’

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Mannering said, gruffly, ‘What you’re telling me is that this isn’t the whole picture.’

‘Luck is never the whole picture,’ said Staines.”

In this passage, Mannering pressures Staines to tell him about where he found the gold that he cashed for Crosbie at the bank. Staines keeps Crosbie’s secret. With his remark that “luck is never the whole picture,” he indicates that, as much as people are under the influence of the celestial bodies, they also do have the opportunity to exercise their free will. This statement also shows that things are not always what they seem.