The Luminaries

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes reference to derogatory terms for sex workers.

“We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture, that there were eight passengers aboard the Godspeed when she pulled out of the harbour at Dunedin, and by the time the barque landed on the Coast, there were nine.”

This is one of the key mysteries of The Luminaries that is never entirely resolved even at the novel’s conclusion: Was Staines on the Godspeed when it arrived in Hokitika? This statement from the unidentified speakers, “we,” which may refer to the celestial bodies themselves, suggests that Staines somehow appeared on the Godspeed while it was in transit, either materially or as an apparition. Moody and Staines are both unsure about whether he was really on the boat.

“Hokitika was growing faster than San Francisco, the papers said, and out of nothing…out of the ancient rotting life of the jungle…out of the tidal marshes and the shifting gullies and the fog…out of sly waters, rich in ore. Here the men were not self-made; they were self-making, as they squatted in the dirt to wash it clean.”

In this quote, Thomas Balfour reflects the conventional European notion of Class Mobility on the Colonial Frontier. He sees Hokitika as a place where people can escape the circumstances of their birth and become wealthy. He thinks of the colonial project as one that is transforming the land from “the ancient rotting life of the jungle” into a “clean,” civilized territory rich in wealth and potential.

“In this way Aubert Gascoigne, born out of wedlock to an English governess, raised in the attics of Parisian row-houses, clothed always in cast-offs, forever banished to the coal scuttle, by turns admonished and ignored, had risen, over time, to become a personage of limited but respectable means. He had escaped his past—and yet he could be called neither an ambitious man, nor an unduly lucky one.”

Gascoigne is representative of one of the men who are able to forge a new life for themselves on the colonial frontier in Hokitika. He is not “unduly lucky,” which suggests that he had a hand in his own circumstances rather than it being the result of fate. However, the use of the astral chart motif suggests that his fate—like those of the other characters in the novel—was in fact determined by the stars.