Lit up by “The Luminaries”

By Robert Macfarlane

We all know the American gold rushes of the mid-19th century. Images from those years leap to mind: somewhere in the Californian desert, a prospector hammers in wooden pegs to stake his claim. Deep in the Yukon at dusk, a wolf howls in the blue distance, then one by one the rest of the pack join in. Miners huddle round the low-burnt fire, touch their rifles for reassurance. Sergio Leone and Jack London are the laureates of these landscapes.

But the New Zealand gold rush? I wasn't aware of its existence until I read Eleanor Catton's vast and intricate novel "The Luminaries", set in the township of Hokitika in 1866. Out of Catton's patient prose emerges a world so completely realised that you feel part of its population. Gold has been found in the sands and rivers of the South Island, and Hokitika teems with speculators, aggregators, bankers and outfitters. Up and down the west coast the diggers toil, delving for the sly glint of ore. Eastwards of Hokitika the land rises into totara forests, rolling hills and clear-watered rivers whose beds are cobbled with "smooth, milky-grey stones that, when split, showed a glassy-green interior, harder than steel" — the sacred Maori stone known as pounamu. And over all of this loom the Southern Alps, ice-capped and incorruptible.