Coming around to liking The Luminaries

I have to say that Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is growing on me - it's 800+ pages and that's a long commitment and not sure I'll make it, but the novel, despite its extreme weirdness and eccentricity, has many strengths. You certainly know from the first sentence that Catton is an extremely intelligent writer; what she's done is to write a piece of historical fiction not as if from the present but as if written and published as a contemporary novel in 1867 - and yet, not quite - it feels like a Victorian (sometimes an Edwardian) novel, in its length, wide range of characters, melodramatic elements, and most of all with its omniscient narrative style that gives us a lot of character analysis - for a lot of characters. Also, the language is antique - "he strode into the room ... " - and even the publishing convention, most notably her quaint demurral at the word "damn" and its variants, always published as "d---n." Yet in other ways the 21st century creeps in: the very frank discussions of sexuality and drug abuse (opiates), rare or nonexistent in 19th-century fiction; the continued crude references to "whores" and "the whore" - I don't think you'd ever see that in 19th-c fiction. Well, it is contemporary fiction after all - and as noted in previous posts it's a bit of a pastiche-parody: not only of the plot complexity and coincidences in Dickens et al but also I've come to see of the narrative conventions of later writers such as Conrad: the first 350 page section of the novel is supposedly built around a group of men explain to a new arrival in town (Moody) the story of a suspicious double-murder: this takes to the ridiculous extreme the conventions of Heart of Darkness, Youth, et al, in which a narrator unfurls an entire novella over the course of an evening on the deck or at the club. M concern with the novel is the absurdity of the murder story that drives the plot - to the extent I can ignore that, think of it just as a Hitchcokian "maguffan" that sets all in motion - the better I like this novel, but if I try to figure out all the conflicts and elements among the many characters dead and alive I just get lost - which may after all be her point. There's some great writing and high intelligence here, but at times I fear it's like a beautiful building with nothing inside.