Sarah Perry (Jonathan Cape)
SARAH PERRY is a writer most famous for The Essex Serpent, recently made into a high-end TV show on . Perry, being neither a sci-fi author nor a science writer, has until now given us no cause to include her on these pages. Her new novel, Enlightenment, however… the clue is in the title.
In this gorgeously written, witty and very moving novel, our hero Thomas Hart is a man of the arts, a novelist and a columnist at the Essex Chronicle. He is also a gay man who regularly attends a chapel in the small town in Essex where he lives, with a congregation that considers being gay a sin. He is close friends with the worshippers there, including a teenager called Grace who he has been looking out for since she was a baby. These chapel friends don’t know Hart is gay, nor what he does when he takes trips to London.
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Our story begins in 1997 when, at the age of 50, Hart is asked by the paper to write about astronomy. Comet Hale-Bopp is approaching and astronomy is having something of a moment.
And so our hero looks up at the sky and takes his first steps into science. Very quickly, he is transformed into a passionate amateur astronomer, and his new interest breeds new adventure. He begins to investigate a local mystery involving a 19th-century female astronomer. Through this investigation, he meets a man, James, at the local museum and falls in love, although he can’t be sure that James feels as he does. Meanwhile, Grace finds love of her own and the wheels of our story are set spinning. I won’t say any more about the plot, except that it spans decades and Hale-Bopp isn’t the only comet to feature.
The novel is clearly date-stamped as we progress through Hart’s life, yet it has a magical timelessness to it, perhaps because he is such a curious, courteous gentleman who might have been at home in centuries past. Perhaps also because the chapel’s worshippers might easily be denizens of a much older age, and because the mystery of the female astronomer feels as vibrant as the stories happening in the “now” of Britain in the 1990s and 2000s. The book involves emails and texts at times, but even these don’t read so differently from the letters the astronomer sends to her mysterious friend, C, deepening the feeling that all this might have happened at any point in the past 200 years.
Very deliberately, the movements of the heavens are invoked time and time again as the story moves on. Planets, the moon and comets rise and fall around each other, and our characters also make their orbits, heaving into view and out again.
I have read elsewhere that Perry, who was brought up in a very strict Baptist church and is also a passionate amateur astronomer, was worried this novel might somehow dishonour God. For me, at least, the book didn’t read as any sort of rejection of religion. Hart’s columns in the newspaper (fictional, of course) punctuate the book most delightfully and they explore his feelings about science and religion very elegantly. At one point, he writes: “I’ve heard it said that at the first sip of the natural sciences you will become an atheist – then at the bottom of the glass, God will be waiting for you.”
Enlightenment is a beautiful, compassionate and memorable book, one that will repay reading more than once. It has inspired me to go outside and look at the heavens more often. I may even take some binoculars!
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Emily also recommends…
Patrick O’Brian (Harper Collins)
Since we are straying rather far from our traditional fare this week, I will take this opportunity to strongly recommend O’Brian’s great Aubrey-Maturin adventure series, which begins with Master and Commander. How I love these books! One of the two main characters, Stephen Maturin, is a man of science, as well as a spy and a ship’s doctor. All 20 of these novels are suffused by Maturin’s love for the natural world and scientific research.
Emily H. Wilson is a former editor of Â鶹´«Ă˝. Gilgamesh, the second novel in her Sumerians trilogy, is out later this year. You can find her at emilyhwilson.com, or follow her on X at @emilyhwilson and on Instagram at @emilyhwilson1
