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“I don’t think you know what’s coming,” says a character in Sarah Perry’s new novel Enlightenment. You can say that again — this is a rich, surprising book that dazzles and dizzies the reader. It balances reason with belief, excels in both ideas and action, and, though firmly placed in Perry’s homeland of Essex, it’s a book with cosmic reach.
While Enlightenment, like its predecessor Melmoth (2018), is broadly contemporary, set between 1997 and 2017, the book has a period feel. This is partly because of the shape it takes: it’s an old-fashioned novel of ideas, riffing on science and religion, where people thresh around under heightened emotions — one experiences what he describes as “ecstatic misery” — rather than the more muted palettes currently fashionable in the modern novel.
It feels historical partly because of the narrative style, which has a fullness, playfulness and omniscience that we associate with novels of the last century or even the one before. So convincing is this that when contemporary references appear — TV soap opera Emmerdale, the Euro 96 football tournament, “hasta la vista, baby” — it’s a jolting reminder that it’s all set within living memory.
Perry knows that she is doing this, of course. “Your work has an old-fashioned feel,” says one character to another, who’s described as having “an air altogether of occupying a time not his own.” That person is Thomas Hart, a journalist on the Essex Chronicle, one of the four major characters who live in the fictional Essex town of Aldleigh that are central to the book.
Thomas is 50 and writes a column for the paper on scientific and astronomical topics, which brings him into connection with James Bower, curator of the local museum. Then there is Grace Macaulay, 17, “small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May” and who is “by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers”. And finally there is Nathan, Grace’s contemporary and the least distinctively drawn of the quartet.
Grace loves Nathan (straightforwardly) and Thomas loves James (complicatedly). This is not easy for Thomas, who has “only ever wanted men . . . wanted them all my life,” but was told that “his nature was an affront to God.” Brought up in the church, he is torn: “Do you think you lose your faith, because your faith does not want you? That would be easy!” Worse, James is happily married and does not love Thomas in return.
The two men are brought together by their discovery of letters from a local astronomer called Maria Văduva, who went missing in the late 19th century. Their encounters take place under the transit — and perhaps the influence — of the Hale-Bopp comet as it makes its approach to Earth in early 1997. The heaven of religion and the heavens filled with stars each make claims on the characters, their “bodies moved by forces not possible to resist.”
The interplay between these four characters is the core of the book, even if much of their communication is one-way: Thomas writes letters to James he will never send (while reading Văduva’s letters about an unnamed man she loves); Grace is bereft when Nathan disappears. The encounters are tangential, like heavenly bodies passing close but not colliding. People, we are regularly reminded, are animals, driven in ways they cannot understand.
Enlightenment is a book that on the one hand marks its interests clearly — how humans connect, how they find meaning — with strong dialogue and appetising set pieces. But it also takes an indirect route into the reader’s head, so that it can seem elusive and even confounding. These people live in a world where passions last for implausibly long times; where someone can, like a comet, disappear and then reappear decades later; where a character can encounter a mysterious figure (there are lots of mysterious figures) in a field and, rather than run a mile, they take him home and run him a bath. The book’s title reminds us of the period of great human discoveries and scientific breakthroughs, but also the revelations experienced by Thomas and Grace.
Like Perry’s vigorous narrative style, all this oddness is in the service of reminding us that this is not real life, but a work of art, a human creation. People discover things — stars, comets — but they also create them too. “I want things to exist in the world because I existed to make them,” says Grace.
At times Enlightenment recalls other writers who have trodden related ground: the erudition of AS Byatt, the ungovernable romances of Iris Murdoch. “Isn’t love goodness?” Grace asks, a line that could have come directly from the lips of a Murdoch hero. This is a novel that’s as happy talking essayistically about science — drawing on TS Eliot and Carlo Rovelli — as it is delivering impressive narrative scenes such as a fairground disaster, a recollection of the ravages of Aids. “I learned that there really are such things as the death rattle, that death will eat a man like a pack of wolves in the night.”
Yet the peculiar intelligence driving the novel is all Perry’s own. Above all, Enlightenment is a book that doesn’t compromise, and is all the more interesting as a result. “Do you like it?” asks Thomas of his editor at one point. “I do,” comes the reply, “but it’s very strange.”
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry Jonathan Cape £20/Mariner $28, 400 pages
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