Remus - You sound more positive about The Luminaries than most of the books I have recommended for you to read, which I will consider success 
About that Guardian review, though:
"But it is also a massive shaggy dog story; a great empty bag; an enormous, wicked, gleeful cheat. For nothing in this enormous book, with its exotic and varied cast of characters whose lives all affect each other and whose fates are intricately entwined, amounts to anything like the moral and emotional weight one would expect of it. That's the point, in the end, I think, of The Luminaries. It's not about story at all. It's about what happens to us when we read novels – what we think we want from them – and from novels of this size, in particular. Is it worthwhile to spend so much time with a story that in the end isn't invested in its characters? Or is thinking about why we should care about them in the first place the really interesting thing? Making us consider so carefully whether we want a story with emotion and heart or an intellectual idea about the novel in the disguise of historical fiction … There lies the real triumph of Catton's remarkable book."
What in God's green Earth is this person wittering about? 
Some of us don't expect to "care" about the characters, and don't want or need "moral and emotional weight". This is not chick-lit, nor is it some family saga drama. Am I missing something?
"Decide for yourself, Reader, at the end of all your reading, what you think of that: is "nothing" enough?"
Well, I didn't think it was "nothing" and Man Booker Prize judges who awarded The Luminaries the 2013 prize seem to agree with me.
The author of this article is from New Zealand. I would be interested to read what she thought about the story from the point of view of a native who is presumably more familiar with the land and the era than most other authors.