hhow do you calm a warring soul? Each of Sarah Perry’s novels grapples generously with this question. Fate vs. Free Will; doubt versus certainty; science against God. The metaphysical battlefield is Perry’s literary terrain. She can’t seem to escape his gravitational pull, nor the estuarine mud of her home county. And so it seems entirely appropriate that the Essex author’s new novel, The Enlightenment, should be a tale of orbits, collisions and other cosmic ellipses: inevitable loops.
We begin in the winter of 1997 in the fictional riverside town of Oldley, a version of Chelmsford where Perry grew up. It was a defining year for Britain: the year of Tony Blair and the landslide of New Labour, the handover of Hong Kong and the parade of Princess Diana’s funeral. But the only event that interests Perry is a celestial one: the fiery arrival of Comet Hale-Bopp. Enlightenment has its neck arched up, its eyes full of moonlight.
Our heroes are a gentleman star benefactor, a master embroiderer and a waking ghost in a black satin dress. In both good and bad ways, Perry’s novel reads like a clash between Wilkie Collinsis the woman in white AS Byatt‘s Possession and the quantum physics of Carlo Rovelli (whom Perry praises in his confessionals). Enlightenment is transparent and unhurried, a sophisticated novel of inner space. It’s luxurious – challenging – old-fashioned.
We follow the fate of Thomas Hart, a boy in his fifties, so infinitely fluffy that he seems to “throw up dust as he walks.” Thomas is an established bachelor of the euphemistic sort and an amateur astronomer (“citizen of the Empire of the Moon”). He writes a weekly column for the local paper, musing on faith, physics and the firmament, and spends his Sundays perched on the hard, narrow pews of Bethesda Baptist Church, a strict Calvinist sect, where he is told that his inner nature is “an offense to God”.
Thomas would have left Bethesda if it hadn’t been for Grace McAuley, the wild-hearted, motherless pastor’s daughter (our needlemaker-in-waiting). Grace is about to turn 18 and Thomas is determined to keep one foot in the chapel door to “let a little of her spirit out and a little of the world in.” They are divided souls, torn between piety and desire. “All these years I’ve had two fires inside me,” laments Thomas, “and neither puts out the other!” Thomas and Grace see each other clearly, giving them the power to protect each other, but also to inflict the most deep wounds. Is it possible to love someone you can never forgive?
It’s hard not to talk about Perry’s upbringing here—like Grace and Thomas, she was raised by Calvinist Baptists—but I’m always cautious about imposing causation. However Perry finds her way onto these pages, what matters to the reader is her imagination, her unerring ability to make the mundane new and strange. All Perry’s hallmarks and talismans are here: jackdaws and nocturnal creatures, salt marshes and river mud, churchyards of cold stone and leather-bound books. Fans of Perry’s breakthrough novel, The Essex Snake, I will be glad. There is also an echo from John FowlesThe French Lieutenant’s Wife, with its ardent fossil hunters and high Victorian mimicry, though Perry’s novel is far more decent: a study in unrequitedness (star hunters look up to the heavens, not down to lustful filth).
Perry has always produced magnificent prose, and she has found a new, ethereal register in this book. Fire and brimstone Gothic is largely gone Melmoth from 2018. In its place is something equally ferocious, but cleaved by starlight. See her description of Hale-Bopp: “The great comet of the age, shining over the pediment of the Lowlands, and falling through Perseus like the last of the rebellious angels.” It’s possible to forgive all sorts of narrative sins for this kind of wonderment.
As the comet moves toward perihelion, the tip of its loop around the sun, Thomas and Grace find themselves drawn into an age-old mystery: the 1887 disappearance of Maria Vaduva, a Romanian comet hunter turned eerie ghost. They will spend the next three decades stumbling upon clues – secret letters, lost tombstones, a mysterious diary, a dress with pearl threads – as Maria’s “black-browed” spirit pulls them out of the shadows. It’s not the greatest mystery plot – too reliant on intuition – but it’s a book about the capriciousness of the stars.
This is both his charm and his greatest weakness. Had Hale-Bopp appeared in another decade or century, I suspect Perry would have written exactly the same book. The comet is important to her, not post-Thatcher politics. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Perry has taken a narrative she loves and a show she wants and stitched them together out of astronomical necessity. I was fascinated by the book’s cosmic weirdness, but bothered by its weird clichés. It’s so tiring to have to deal with yet another story of sophisticated, chaste gay loneliness.
When the telescope is first used – tilted up in the dark – what the astronomer sees that night is called “First Light”. It is as if at this moment a new consciousness is born, a new eye opens. At its best, this is what Perry was able to capture in The Enlightenment. The joy of first light.
