From The Essex Serpent to the secrets of the cosmos
400pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£20, ebook £10.99
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I suspect Sarah Perry exerts some magical pull over the cosmos, for her celestial-minded fourth novel arrives in the wake of a comet and a much-discussed North American eclipse.
Like AS Byatt’s Possession, Enlightenment is a baroque, genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A richly layered epic, it marks Perry’s return to the world of her bestseller The Essex Serpent – fans will enjoy encountering its protagonist Cora Seaborne – and her native county. It also draws on the author’s Strict Baptist upbringing, a religion she has left due to its limits on free thought.
Spanning 20 years in three parts, Enlightenment opens in 1997 in the fictional town of Aldleigh, where we meet Thomas, a 50-yearold novelist and journalist, and his friend Grace, both congregants at a Strict and Particular Baptist chapel. Perry movingly explores the conflicting effect of the austere sect on Thomas, who lives a double life, his closeted homosexuality deemed “an affront to God”, and on Grace, who at 17 is “exhausted by all her daily calculations of how to be good”.
Deviating from his usual subjects, Thomas reluctantly accepts a commission to write about the comet Hale-Bopp. He is also invited by the handsome local museum director, James, to view some documents unearthed while renovating Lowlands House, a stately home that has gone to ruin, allegedly haunted.
So begins an all-consuming journey into astronomy, local history and unrequited love. (His passion for astronomy is also Perry’s, and her soaring prose does its utmost to convey its marvels to the less sky-drunk among us.) Meanwhile, Grace meets Nathan, an alluring contemporary who opens the door to the worldly temptations of Silk Cut and soap operas.
With its plangent themes of physical decay, unfulfilled desire and resentment, Enlightenment reminds us that suffering is the human condition. Yet it is also a heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet. When his Christianity falters, Thomas turns to physics, but again finds no certainties, and the limits of his understanding require another leap of faith. As the novel builds to a transcendental finale, Perry urges us to “look up, and wonder”.