Ash Davida Jane
The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds by Gina Butson (Allen & Unwin NZ, 2025), 320pp, $38
In a novel that spans 15 years and takes place in five cities across three countries, Gina Butson’s The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds crafts a panorama of incident and circumstance in exotic-seeming locations, but despite a sensuous evocation of place and an essentially melodramatic plot, this is the novelist as moralist, more preoccupied with her characters’ interior worlds.
We first get to know Thea, Sarah and Chris during their prolonged stay in San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, where all three have arrived after setting off independently from New Zealand and Australia on travels through Central America. Through the novel’s carefully crafted third-person narration we are given Sarah and Thea’s thoughts and feelings at different times, but never Chris’s, which keeps his inner workings a mystery from the reader as much as the other characters. Through this limited narrative view, gaps form, and it’s these gaps that propel us through what might be an otherwise predictable story.
Part 1 introduces us to the three travellers in the popular backpacking destination San Pedro La Laguna. Sarah and Chris are dating, while Chris has struck up a friendship with Thea during a week alone. Tales of white, middle-class backpackers in Central America have their own tropes and clichés, and Butson doesn’t shy away from these. Chris, especially, spends most of his time indulging in the cheap drinks and drugs that are readily available in San Pedro, showing no interest in seeing the surrounding landscapes, learning Spanish, or understanding the position of this apparent travellers’ haven in the wider context of Guatemala or its impact on the Indigenous population. His refrain whenever Sarah or Thea suggest an activity is ‘pasado mañana,’ as in, let’s put it off until the day after tomorrow—a day that never comes. The two women are more interested in exploring the town and engaging with the local culture, but they’re easily pulled along by the current of Chris’s whims. They seem largely untouched by the outside world, including the onset of the global financial crisis, which Chris plans to ride out in San Pedro, selling drugs to other tourists and drinking until the early hours every night.
The monotony of these days begins to wear thin, though it helps to build a sense of foreboding and tension between the characters. Thea grows ‘restless and uneasy’, feelings that the reader can easily empathise with. We’re a third of the way through the novel before Thea finally leaves San Pedro La Laguna, saying goodbye to Sarah and Chris for now as she continues on her travels. While this first section develops the dynamic between the three and helps set the bar for what we expect of them later in the novel, it could definitely be more condensed. The first major narrative beat comes only now, as a tragic event launches us into what feels like the real story. The shock of what happens is softened by the long build-up and moments of heavy foreshadowing, dulling its impact.
For the most part, the prose in The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds is unremarkable and direct. It’s when describing landscapes and the characters in nature, hiking and swimming, for example, that Butson finds her best voice. A section in Part 2 where Thea is in Wellington visiting her stepmother stands out for its descriptions of swimming at Oriental Bay: ‘The harbour is glass-still on the surface but underneath jellyfish drift through the water like untethered moons.’ With a few short paragraphs the author clearly evokes the city, painting an image of ‘buildings gripping against the tumble into the sea.’ Similarly polished is the sequence of a Ruapehu climb that goes wrong, which bookends the novel. These scenes on Ruapehu are the most vivid and affecting pieces of writing in the book, with sharp, compelling prose that keeps the reader firmly in the moment:
Time expands and contracts. The only constant is the mountain.
The cold settles on Thea like a cloud of sandflies—a presence so insistent and all-consuming.
Then it’s gone.
Her body so cold that it starts to feel warm.
Butson notes in her acknowledgements that the novel grew from an initial short story titled ‘Tajumulco’, which is a stratovolcano in Guatemala (the same type of volcano as Ruapehu). It’s Tajumalco that Thea climbs immediately after leaving San Pedro. After the time spent in San Pedro, stalled and surrounded by ‘permatourists’, at the top of Tajumalco she feels ‘the stretch of possibility in all directions’. In reading The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds, the presence of these volcanic mountains is felt throughout, and it makes sense that they formed the seed of the author’s thinking for the novel. If a version of the Ruapehu sequence was part of this earlier story, that would explain why it feels like the strongest section of the novel—and suggests in turn that other parts may be a touch undercooked. While The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds sits comfortably in the realm of current popular fiction, it feels just as influenced by modes of scenic writing set in Aotearoa New Zealand. Gina Butson’s book is in conversation with publications like To the Mountains: A collection of New Zealand alpine writing by Laurence Fearnley and Paul Hersey, as well as with writing by her contemporary fiction peers.
The first half of the Ruapehu sequence comes in the prologue and sets a scene of enthusiastic human rigour against a stark, unmoving natural landscape—thus posing the main conflict of the book as ‘man versus nature’. We only learn how this climb plays out at the end of the novel, once we’ve seen how its impact has stretched out over a decade and a half. The full reveal of what happened leads us to a catharsis that is much needed after the tensions in the rest of the novel, where the reader’s frustration builds over a long period of time with no clear communication between the characters. There’s a significant juxtaposition between this pacey, action-packed sequence where Thea and the others on the climb are forced to make life or death decisions, and the large stretches of the novel where she and Chris (now a couple) are comfortable at home, stuck in the same patterns of avoidance and repressing their respective feelings of grief and guilt. These sections of the novel, based primarily in Melbourne and Hobart, offer ‘man versus self’ as the alternative primary conflict, as each of Butson’s characters deal with numerous internal struggles that, though they wouldn’t appear so from the outside, dominate the way they live their lives.
In Australia, Thea and Chris seem just as untouched by the rest of the world as they did in San Pedro La Laguna. This is exemplified by how unaffected they are by the Covid-19 pandemic when it begins in 2020. Living in Tasmania, they experience just three days of lockdown—a long weekend—with no other evidence of the pandemic featuring in their lives. While many readers might be grateful not to read more about lockdowns after a long period of oversaturation, this feels like a telling detail about the insularity of Thea and Chris’s relationship. They’re stuck in their own world but never manage to fully understand each other, held back by their unwillingness to confront the past and be honest about what happened.
These characters met while travelling to escape their real lives and avoid their feelings, but returning home becomes just another way to flee the reality of loss and to reject any sense of complicity or consequences. Butson utilises the three-day lockdown as a narrative tool, trapping the couple in their comfortable Hobart home and letting a sense of pressure build. This brings some relief for the reader who wants Thea to force an explanation from Chris, having waited 14 years of in-story time to find out what happened in that first tragic beat. The eventual revelations come after a lot of twisting and turning in the conversation, and this three-day period of limbo stretches out to feel agonisingly long. Yet while the novel’s time span of 15 years feels at times questionable, Butson shows her ability to wield time as an instrument, stretching and condensing in turn to control the narrative.
The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds shows how a novel can hold many different pieces of a narrative at once. Though sections of the novel could have been trimmed to better maintain momentum and narrative balance, the story does come to a satisfying conclusion after a cathartic sequence, utilising jumps between time periods to reveal information to the reader in a way that feeds suspense. Butson investigates the depths of grief and guilt and how they intertwine by putting her characters in difficult situations and forcing them to react. With complex characters who are allowed to be unlikeable, she can ask questions about how things go wrong and how we react when they do.
With four major tragic beats playing out through the course of The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds, the main theme of the novel very much becomes how we react to tragedy. Though they seem distinct at first, these four events start to feel inextricably linked. At the heart of this connection is the question of who is at fault, and the way there is almost never a simple answer. How much of tragedy is due to bad decisions and how much is simply luck? How many different things have to go wrong for the worst to happen? The line between culpability and innocence is ‘a wavering high-line strung between two mountaintops’. In Butson’s novel, as perhaps in life, it’s the way people act after the fact that shows us their characters, more so than any incidental choices or actions in the lead-up to disaster.
ASH DAVIDA JANE is a poet, editor and reviewer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara who is currently living in Melbourne.
Leave a Reply