Walter Moody arrives in the Hokitika gold
fields of New Zealand after a rough crossing on William Carver’s boat. He
checks into the Crown Hotel where he inadvertently gate-crashes a gathering of
twelve men. Despite their diversity, he senses a joint enterprise and slowly,
with his gentle probing, it emerges.
It involves, inevitably, gold, but also opium,
fraud, a whore, and secrets galore. That gathering and the participants’
narratives take up four hundred pages and the first half of the book. The days
that follow bring a suspicious death, an unexplained disappearance, and an
unravelling of hidden truths as the story moves forward with flashes back to
fill in gaps.
It is complex and following the disparate
dozen’s movements, motives and machinations is challenging particularly as
there are another dozen or so substantial, if subsidiary, characters to get to
grips with. There is a cast list to help with remembering who’s who, but
keeping track of what, why, when and how is left up to the reader.
The pace of the book shifts up a gear in the
second half, with more and shorter chapters; and accelerates so that by the end
the chapter headings are almost as long as the text introduced. The prose is
rich and measured, evoking the mid nineteenth century setting.
It is a big book (over 800 pages) that demands
a big commitment to keep on top of, but probably rewards proportionately.
Personally, I drifted a bit and so was only moderately impressed.
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