The 2012 novel The Luminaries, set on New Zealand’s South Coast during the gold rush of 1865, won the Booker Prize for its author Eleanor Catton, and she has boldly attacked her own work for this lavishly-realised BBC-backed 6x60 series from Working Title TV and Southern Light.
Catton has cut away at a plot which was already assembled like a jigsaw puzzle and worked on splicing it back together with series director/EP Claire McCarthy (2018’s Ophelia). As a visual package, it sits well with The Piano and The Lord Of the Rings as the top three reasons to visit New Zealand the minute this global pandemic is over.
The Luminaries is sheer optical escapism, clad in period settings which, like the gold which drifts from the pink dress worn by its heroine (Eve Hewson) in the arresting opening episode, dazzle and seduce. Once the dust has settled, however, Catton’s story can be harder to fall in love with than its alluring setting.
The plot is a murder mystery, essentially, with added astrological elements. A travelling politico; a dead prospector in a hut; an unconscious woman leaking gold from a ragged ballgown; and a Maori native who has been shot through his green pounamu stone. Or, as one character puts it, “the middle of nowhere, the middle of the night – a savage, a politician and a whore.”
Catton and McCarthy will unpick that central mystery over the next six hours but it’s how the director shows it that impresses. The narrative steps – a twisted timeline, the identification of the victim, the separation of the central lovers, the feint of supernatural elements – are less compelling than McCarthy’s delivery of the Wild West of New Zealand of 150-odd years ago.
Craft, as we have come to expect from that country, is a standout, from the recreation of the gold town of Hokitika on the West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island, to the costumes, to the shocking natural beauty captured by DoP Denson Baker.
The series roams backwards and forwards over a nine-month timeline, with events spiralling quickly from a first meeting between Anna Wetherell (Hewson) and Emery Staines (Yesterday’s Himesh Patel) on board their ship the morning they dock in Dunedin after a lengthy voyage from London.
A spirited solo traveller in search of her fortune in the new world when we first meet her, The Luminaries’ leading light Anna will move – at a clip - into prostitution, drug addiction, to becoming a murder suspect, a prisoner, and an apprentice to local madam and astrological enthusiast Lydia Wells (who is always imperious and vampy and conniving and always Eva Green).
