In this special Wheeler Centre event, Eleanor Catton speaks to Louise Swinn about the epic novel and the ideas that have bled into it -- including Jungian archetypes, the zodiac, 19th Century newsprint and the 'settlers narrative' of New Zealand's North Island.
They discuss the roundabout way in which Catton arrived at the style and era of The Luminaries, her fondness for 'a certain kind of verbal wordplay' and her disdain for literary fiction's distancing of itself from genre fiction.
On the subject of her approach to writing, Catton confesses that she 'never really wanted anything else' but to be a novelist, and explores the role of influence, fear, trouble and writing for 'an imagined audience of every author that you've ever read'.
Asked about a bloom of historical fiction in New Zealand, Catton offers that it may signal a literary maturity which allows writers to rebel against the sense of a rigid past; but she also argues that The Luminaries does not strictly belong to the genre.
She briefly considers the adaptation of the text into a miniseries -- citing an interest in the difference between film and publishing contracts -- and, on the subject of children's literature, offers a list of influential books she read as a child (her mother was a children's librarian), and argues for why libraries are superior to book stores for that genre.