The Elephant in the Tent 
 What is this book? I think of the story of the elephant in the tent, too large to be comprehended as a whole (and this is 800 pages), and where everyone looking through their particular slit in the canvas gets only their particular part of it. But there are clues the moment one opens the book, even on the dust-jacket, with a series of pictures of a woman's face waxing or waning like the phases of the moon. 
 Open the cover, and the first thing you see is a Note to the Reader, beginning thus: 
 The stellar and planetary positions in this book have been determined astronomically. That is to say we acknowledge the celestial phenomenon known as 'precession,' by which motion the vernal equinox, the astrological equivalent of the Greenwich meridian, has come to shift. 
 All of which means absolutely nothing to me, as I have little knowledge of astrology and still less belief, but it is obviously important to the author. She follows the note with a list of twelve principal characters, assigning each a house and, in the astrological charts which open each section, a particular sign. Almost all the chapter headings also have astrological significance; to me, they are often evocative but not meaningful. Yet I need not have worried. If Catton wants to use such devices to organize and reshuffle her complex material, all strength to her. Readers with an interest in such arcana may get even more out of the novel, but there was more than enough there for me to realize that this was a very special kind of book indeed. 
 Special first of all in its resonant adoption of the nineteenth-century writing style. Catton does not merely write of events taking place during the New Zealand gold rush in 1865 and 1866, she inhabits the period totally (marred only by the curious editorial decision in the American edition to spell the colour, which is the miners' term for gold, as color, even though the same readers will not balk at, say, gaol for jail). Without ever descending to purple passages or flashy description, Catton writes with such breadth and mastery that one keeps reading, even slowly over a period of many days, for the sheer pleasure of her language, even when one is bewildered as to what is actually happening. And also for the slow unfolding of her characters, each of whom has more petals than a rose, and tendrils that reach out and entwine with one another in an almost impenetrable thicket. 
 For if you were to grasp at only one label for this elephant in the tent, I suppose you would have to call it a Mystery. At the beginning, a young English lawyer named Walter Moody lands at the goldrush town of Hokitika on New Zealand's West coast and checks in at an hotel. There, he accidentally gatecrashes a meeting of twelve citizens of various nationalities and stations in life, who have convened to discuss various recent happenings that may or may not be criminal in nature: a hermit found dead with a large stash of gold in his possession, a whore lying unconscious in the road and accused of attempted suicide, a rich prospector nowhere to be found, and a valuable trunk purloined or mislaid. But most mystery stories proceed by certain rules: there is a clear crime, one or more detectives, a cloud of witnesses, and a dwindling number of suspects. Here, however, the characters are reporters, detectives, witnesses, and suspects all at the same time. Almost every conversation uncovers new wrongdoing, adds new information, and shifts suspicion, giving us a deeper understanding of the characters involved at every turn. I suspect that Catton sees the constant realignment of characters as parallel to the equally constant realignment of the stars and planets in the astrological system. It is certainly fascinating, but also bewildering--maybe intentionally so. 
 Among the clues you get from opening the book, there is also one of the most extraordinary tables of contents I have ever seen. The novel is divided into twelve parts, but look at the page-numbers! The first is almost half the entire book (360 pages), the second is half that (180), the third is half that again, and so on, with the last few parts being only a page or two each. I have no idea of the mathematical reason for this, but it gives a special quality to the experience of reading. The first 360 pages are slow going, as character succeeds character and revelations multiply. If not by the end of this first part then certainly by the middle of the second, the sheer number of clues and connections (for most of these people knew each other on the East coast before coming West) multiply to the point where it would be impossible for the normal reader to keep track of them all, unless he were drawing up charts or keeping notes. I began to suspect that Catton, in her sheer profusion, was much less interested in the normal patterns of a mystery story than in the sheer complexity of interaction that results from all these interconnections, both random and determinate at the same time. 
 Yet she does play fair. As the sections get shorter towards the end, two things happen: we get a clearer sense of the facts, and a deeper empathy with the people. There is a highly satisfying court scene towards the end, with Walter Moody appearing magnificently for the defense. But, unlike traditional mystery novels, there are still over 100 pages to go, and Catton uses these to go back in time to events in Dunedin on the East coast. In nineteenth-century style, she had always prefaced her chapters with short summaries, as a tongue-in-cheek teaser for the detail that would follow. But now the summaries get longer and longer and often sneak in factual information which is not in the actual text at all. Meanwhile, the shrinking texts get more and more personal: dialogues and brief encounters, telling us more about the characters as human beings. For whatever her interest in astrology and character types and planetary influences, whatever role is played by chaos theory, these people act ultimately as individuals, with real hopes, fears, and passions. We come to care for them, in some cases quite deeply. In the last resort, that is what matters--and that, I believe, is why Eleanor Catton deserved to win the Booker, and all the other prizes that seem to have followed.