Article
Booker prize: Eleanor Catton becomes youngest winner for The Luminaries
Mark Brown, The Guardian
Judges praise 832 ‘extraordinary’ pages of epic novel that New Zealander began writing when she was 25
Eleanor Catton has made Man Booker prize history twice by becoming the youngest winner for, at 832 pages, the longest novel.
The New Zealander was 25 when she began writing The Luminaries, an epic 19th-century gold rush murder mystery. Now 28, she also becomes an “end of an era” winner: the last recipient of a Booker prize which, for 45 years, has only allowed Commonwealth and Irish writers – next year, the Americans are coming.
This year’s chair of judges, the writer and critic Robert Macfarlane, admitted readers needed to make a “huge investment” in the doorstopping book; it is challenging with a slow start but the dividends were more than worth it.
“We have returned to it three times,” he said. “We have dug into it and the yield it has offered at each new reading has been extraordinary.”
Macfarlane said it took just under two hours for the judges to decide on the winner and there was no need for a vote. “There was pretty tough discussion, we put the novels to the test … and, at the end, we were all very happy.”
It was a pleasant judging process, he said. “I don’t want it to sound tranquil to the point of tranquillised because it wasn’t that. We brought pressures to bear on the novels, but it was a very happy process.”
Catton’s novel easily set a new longest winner record, beating Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which was 672 pages long and AS Byatt’s Possession, at 624 pages.
Catton became only the second New Zealander to win after Keri Hulme in 1985 for The Bone People. It was also the first win for the publisher, Granta.
The novel had been up against the shortest work ever to be shortlisted: Colm Toibin’s 30,000 word novella The Last Testament of Mary which had been widely tipped to be the winner. The favourite had been Jim Crace’s Harvest. Also missing out were Ruth Ozeki for A Tale for the Time Being; Jhumpa Lahiri for The Lowland and NoViolet Bulawayo for We Need
Catton takes the youngest winner title from Ben Okri who was 32 when The Famished Road won the Booker prize in 1991.
But Macfarlane praised the maturity of the work. “You read every sentence and you are astonished by its knowledge and its poise,” he said.
In a way, the winner is a classic Victorian novel with murder, red herrings, conspiracies and fallen women. Macfarlane said judges had interrogated whether Catton’s novel was “pastiche, is this more than neo-Victoriana? And in the end we concluded very much that it wasn’t.”
The Luminaries is Catton’s second novel after The Rehearsal, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian first book award.