What I’m Watching: “The Luminaries”
Recently, the world premiere of the TV adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, screened here in NZ.
I was very keen to see the six-part series for a number of reasons: the novel is written by a New Zealander and is also set in New Zealand; it won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2013; and the novel’s author, Eleanor Catton, wrote the screenplay, so I felt the dramatization should be true to to the essence of the novel, which—gulp, true confessions!—I haven’t yet read.
By way of a broad synopsis, The Luminaries is an historical drama set in New Zealand’s 1860s gold rush era, with the action chiefly taking place in Dunedin, and Hokitika on the West Coast. The story weaves together the history of the era: with its explosion of gold mining bringing prospectors from all over the world, including a sizeable contingent of Chinese miners, into the the remoteness of regions such as the West Coast, the rohe of Ngati Waewae. Its multiple strands also encompass the era’s legacy of gold diggings, coastal trading, and licentiousness, including drunken-ness (Hokitika was famous for having a population of 25,000 and over 100 pubs), opium dens and brothels, as well as the astrological influence that give both the novel and TV series their name: The Luminaries.
The astrological influence makes its presence felt from the outset, with the simultaneous arrival in Dunedin of astrological “twins”: Anna Wetherell (Eve Hewson) and Emery Staines (Himesh Patel). Both intend seeking their fortunes on the goldfields but are almost immediately separated by the connivance of those they first encounter. Anna is drawn into the orbit of Lydia Wells (played by Eva Green), a psychic, fortune teller and adventuress, while Emery’s path crosses that of Lydia’s lover, sea captain and ex-convict, Francis Carver (Marton Csokas). Other significant characters include Crosbie Wells, Lydia’s husband, who has made a significant gold strike; Chinese miner, Quee Long; and Te Rau Tauwhare, a local Maori and greenstone hunter, although there are a cast of lesser figures.
The heart of the drama revolves about the astrological connection of Anna and Emery, the effect of Crosbie Well’s gold on the lives and fates of all the central characters, and the ruthless ambitions of Lydia Wells and Francis Carver in particular. A lesser, but still potent influence is the friendship between Emery, Crosbie, and Te Rau Tauwhare.
Visually, The Luminaries is powerful, atmospheric, and evocative, with the West Coast landscape in particular a dark, brooding, and ‘distant’ influence. I feel that the dirt, roughness, and wildness of colonial-era Dunedin and Hokitika are also successfully evoked, and the cast of characters are diverse and intriguing.
The acting performances are strong, particularly Eva Green and Marton Csokas, but all the principal characters are convincing. I did, however, find the character of Anna, in particular, frustratingly lacking in agency throughout most of the series. Although this species of heroine-as-victim may have been popular in the Victorian era itself, it doesn’t accord with what I know of the history of the women, such as Queenstown’s Julia O’Malley, who survived and made their mark in NZ’s goldfields era. As a viewer, I found Anna difficult to invest in or care about.
Initially, I was slow to warm to and become engaged in the story, but the middle episodes definitely drew me in. However, there was too much of the drama where the characters’ motivation and actions felt inexplicable in terms of the action. Much of Anna’s behaviour throughout fitted into this category, as did the coming together of the thirteen protagonists toward the end. Although I understood that their coming together was intended as significant in terms of the zodiac’s luminaries, many of the characters just hadn’t seemed that important in the story to date, so as a viewer I was puzzled by it, more than anything else.
Although historical in setting, the importance of the astrological influences, in particular, but also the ability of one character to physically translocate, shift the story into the magic realism end of the fantasy spectrum. The translocation, however, came at the very end and seemingly out of nowhere, which felt in the nature of a deus ex machina and correspondingly unsatisfactory. The courtroom ending, too, felt overly ‘pat’ and ‘neat’, compared to the rest of the story, so overall I was left feeling unsatisfied and that the series underdelivered.