She's young, she's pretty and she won the Man Booker Prize last year, beating our very own Jhumpa Lahiri. Eleanor Catton, the author of The Luminaries, may not quite like that description, but at Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (ZeeJLF) where writers are stars, she has been trailed by readers the way fans follow filmstars. Her talent has drawn thronging crowds at the festival this year.
The past year has been a busy one for Catton, with publicity engagements for her book which came out in late 2013. Now she faces yet another round of hoopla, which continues with appearances at festivals like this one. This new kind of engagement with the public, she attributes to the Booker. Back home in New Zealand, too, she finds herself recognised quite a bit. "But, it's on the personal level that I like to connect, which is wonderful, [such as] grannies hugging me at supermarkets."
It's heady but Catton is already a little wary of stardom. "You are expected to be on the stage a lot. It can be seductive. It is [also] quite an alienating situation...I don't know anything about you and I am not asking," she says, referring to this interviewer. "You are asking me questions and we will leave without me knowing anything about your life. And, that's not the way a writer's life should be. You can start thinking that you are important," she laughs.
Catton said she's already impatient to get back home where she can put up her feet and read, which, she says, is an important part of writing. She's also afraid of what effect all the adulation will have on her writing: "One thing that can happen to writers after they have been affirmed or their work acknowledged in a big way is that they become easy on themselves, they become indulgent. I never want that to happen. My way of dealing with it is never to go near writing until all of this recedes out of my life." For now, Catton is not allowing the pressure to get to her, though she realises that there is now an expectation from her.
The Luminaries, a doorstopper at nearly 900 pages, is a complicated love story-murder mystery that's set in the island settlement of Hokitika in the south of New Zealand in the 1860s, when there was a rush of gold prospectors to the area.
But, what's remarkable and rather innovative about the novel is how Catton weaves an astrological super-structure into the plot —each of the characters and their associations is associated with one of the 12 zodiac signs, and there is a circularity of time built into the plot that evokes the waxing and waning of the moon. "It is important for a novel to have a belief system, but it's not something that I would ever use again in another literary context."
Interestingly, the last time a New Zealander won the Booker was 28 years ago, the year she was born, Catton points out. So does she believe in astrology herself? "I was very surprised in my research to discover how much psychological truth there is [in the zodiac signs]. The interplay between what we project on to the heavens and what the heavens project back to us, is so robust and endlessly fascinating," says Catton, who relied on a popular book on the subject called Sextrology, a Linda Goodman clone that helps people choose their sexual partners according to the Zodiac. "It's very low brow I am afraid," says Catton.
