MixedThe Financial TimesEach of these characters is developed over many pages. They are ‘stock’ but it is good stock. The reader comes to know and enjoy them. The mysteries and the melodrama multiply, each story seeming to lead into another. The tone is cool, the telling clear, almost hard-headed, except in one late aspect where it slides towards sentimentality … This is costume drama. It is conventional fiction but with the attention to fact and connection that the (cross-checking and online research) facilities of the modern computer permit … Such a conventional ‘story’ requires a conventional rounding off and bowing out; but so many hares, false and real, have been set running, no tidy resolution is possible, and The Luminaries tails off in a tangle of loose ends.
