BookBrowse Reviews Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

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Under the eaves of their Baptist church, two friends of different generations grapple with aching legacies of unrequited love and resentment, while the mystery of a local astronomer cycles in and out of their lives.

Following two friends three decades apart in age who hail from the Bethesda Church Baptist community in Aldleigh, Essex, Sarah Perry's Enlightenment opens with the older: bookish, middle-aged writer Thomas Hart. Known for his local Essex Chronicle columns on ghosts and literature, Thomas agrees to attempt a piece on the 1997 arrival of Great Comet Hale-Bopp at naked-eye visibility in the night sky. Enraptured by a subsequent close look at the moon, Thomas begins a decades-long obsession with astronomy. Soon afterwards, he belatedly agrees to meet with James Bower at Essex Museum Services, who has written to Thomas about recently discovered documents from the dilapidated Lowlands House, surmising them to be related to the Lowlands ghost he has featured in his column. Thomas's growing enthusiasm for astronomy only increases as he gradually figures out that the Lowlands ghost is likely Maria Văduva — a heartbroken astronomer who moved to the house in the late 1800s — while himself falling in love with James, despite Bethesda's condemnation of same-sex love.

The younger of Enlightenment's pair is Grace Macaulay, a seventeen-year-old girl with oily black hair who wears homemade petticoats and dresses. Her kinship with Thomas was cemented from the first time he saw her at Bethesda, a newborn swaddled in her father's arms. Grace's regulated religious upbringing is disrupted in the middle of a service when an eighteen-year-old boy named Nathan accidentally shatters the church's glass with a golf ball. Cut on her neck by a shard, Grace finds herself falling for Nathan and his world of delights and pleasures (ripped jeans, cigarettes, and contemporary music) alien to the modesty enforced upon her by Bethesda. This intimacy is met with side-eye and consternation even from Thomas, despite his own complicated feelings towards his religious faith for its restrictions on his sexuality. Both characters' love stories prove to have lasting consequences as Enlightenment revisits them in 2007 and 2017.

Much of Enlightenment's heartfelt introspection lies with Thomas. Dispersed throughout are fragments of his writing: his articles for the Essex Chronicle relating the laws of physics and astronomy to his own personal and generalized explications on relationships, as well as correspondence addressed to James, with later emails deriving a deeply confessional and anguished tone from the belief that James will never see them. Thomas's meandering philosophical passages on the human condition, tinged with melancholy and self-contemplation, would perhaps not seem out of place in Virginia Woolf — in "Disordered Time," written for the Chronicle, Thomas recounts how while taking a walk through Aldleigh, "I experience the town not with this present self, but with all the selves I have contained, and will ever contain. Sometimes I meet myself on the stairs, and sometimes I see friends who died or left me in other ways — and my experience of them now consists of every experience of them I have ever had. So you see, I've learned it's possible to despise and love a friend equally, in the same place and at the same time."

If literary Thomas represents scholarship, study, and erudite meditation, much younger Grace represents the real-time experiences of the body — "She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers…She had the sudden wordless affection of a farmyard animal, and a habit of butting her small body like a lamb against Thomas." Her impulsiveness and recklessness are typical of protagonists at the center of coming-of-age narratives. In its exploration of her selfhood's development, Enlightenment dwells at length on Grace's growing awareness of her sexuality and its traumas and ecstasies as she strives towards "goodness" beneath the roof of Bethesda: "It was her habit to examine herself every evening by lamplight, as if her body were a bit of clay being worked on against her will…In this light she found herself erotic, and wondered if this was a form of desire that constituted a sin."

As Grace gets older and approaches middle age over the course of Enlightenment's twenty years, a poignant question arises: what happens when the development from girlhood to adulthood is thwarted by the people and communities we love most? More broadly, and applying to both Grace and Thomas, how does one contend with a fragmented selfhood, a selfhood that has been partially erased, hidden, or prevented from coming to satisfying fruition?

Underlying Grace and Thomas's stories, as they navigate their friendship and provincial religious dogma, is a throughline of emotional and psychological states perceived as "madness." In the fragmented documents that Thomas uncovers of Maria, mostly letters to a dear friend on "Foolish Street," she writes in an impassioned and intimate style about fending off accusations of madness as she goes on her nightly hunts of the sky, while herself despairing about the all-consuming madness of unrequited love. When Thomas is alone, he frequently finds himself confessing to and admonished by the spirit of Maria, enrobed in her iconic dark-colored dress embellished with pearls. These hauntings of the past let ambiguity linger: withholding judgment, Enlightenment never clarifies whether Thomas is actually interacting with the infamous Lowlands ghost or if she is an illusion manifested from his anxieties and grief.

Perry's novel is embroiled in the feeling of an antiquated and nostalgic past existing beyond its due. Thomas is initially described as having "An air altogether of occupying a time not his own — might he be more at ease in an Edwardian dining room, say, or on a pitching clipper's deck?" These descriptors extend to Enlightenment's construction and style: its lengthy sentences brim with vivid details of setting and character psychology within moments of everyday life. In subtle homage to conventions of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century novels, the syntax is laden with adverbs, clauses, colons, and semicolons. Linguistic relics persisting beyond their heyday make Enlightenment's investment in loss and time even more immersive, despite a deliberate slowness and even initial tedium in its pacing, as it explores love and daily intimacies against the gothic, religious, and scientific, a contemporary echo in the tradition of Middlemarch.

This review first ran in the June 19, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.