by Sarah Perry’s third book. Melmoth, still, in my opinion, one of the most complex and brilliant novels of the past decades: a serious and funny attempt to grapple with the darkest elements of the twentieth century. Perry is even better known The Essex snake, his best story of science, religion and monsters in late 19th century England. Her extraordinary and ambitious fourth novel, Enlightenmentis best thought of as a combination of the two previous books, almost as a sequel to The Essex snake and in which there are regular non-canonical echoes of it Melmoth.
The book opens in 1997 with the Hale-Bopp comet high in the sky above the (fictional) Essex town of Aldleigh, just upriver from the Black River marshes and the half-submerged (and also fictional) village of Aldwinter. The Essex snake. Our hero is the unlikely figure of Thomas Hart, “an Essex man, for his sins”, who is 50, bookish, gay, and columnist for Essex Chronicle. He had “the melancholy religious air of a priest destroyed about him” and no wonder: he leads a double life, traveling down to London to pick up men before returning to sit in the pews at Bethesda church, a congregation of Strict and A particular baptism.
Perry herself was raised a Strict Baptist, and one of the animating energies of this novel is the way she tackles that discordant heritage: her respect for the community and the moral clarity of the church, recognizing her, as one character, as he says, lived with their God “as if they had a lodger upstairs who would hit the floor with a broom if they ever made a noise”. The novel traces the friendship between Thomas and a teenage girl in the congregation, Grace Macauley, who feels like a version of Perry herself as a bright, playful young woman grappling with the conflicting demands of her faith and the temptations of adolescent life. .
Hart is persuaded, reluctantly at first, to start writing a column on astronomy in the Chronic. We read these columns, recognizing the way Hart finds in the stars and the physics that govern his path through the sky a kind of religious joy. “I was a citizen of the empire of the moon,” he writes in his first column. Later, we read that “when he understood Kepler’s laws, he was almost moved to tears by such intense beauty”. Reading quantum mechanics, he discovers that “the strangeness of all theology is there”. Towards the end of the book, Tomás discovers that “the night sky offered him a liturgy, and he enthusiastically attended the indestructible beauty of its syllables and suggestions: a red shift, a blue shift, and the right motion of the stars.”
In this serial, intelligent and moving book, Perry has created a quantum novel
Bethesda church is located next to a ruined country house, Lowland. There are rumors about a ghost – a woman who lurked in the background of the photos. Thomas wrote about her in his columns and is contacted by the curator of the local museum, James Bower, who thinks he has recognized the woman. He believes her to be Maria Vǎduva Bell, a Romanian who married a wealthy owner of the Lowlands. Through a collection of diaries and letters, we piece together a picture of the enigmatic Maria, herself an astrologer, still in love with a poet in Bucharest.
There’s also romance in the late 90s story: Thomas falls for James (the determined heterosexual), and Grace meets another rakish student named Nathan. Meanwhile, another Romanian appears: a wandering priest with a dark past who could help solve Mary’s mystery. There are two major series pieces here, both potential tragedies: one sees the Lowlands burned to the ground, the other is more fleeting and intimate, though its ramifications are felt throughout the novel’s wide range. We revisit Thomas, Grace and Nathan in 2008, then again in 2017, each time with the sense of entering a world completely changed and held together by the same essential forces.
There is one unusual moment in the 1997 part of the book when Thomas, Grace and Nathan go together to visit Aldwinter. It feels like an act of pilgrimage, walking in the footsteps of Cora and Will The Essex snake. This points to one of the novel’s deepest themes: motion and time. Perry cites the work of Carlo Rovelli in his acknowledgments, but rather than just using the theoretical physicist’s work to borrow many of Thomas’ journalistic ideas on science, it feels like Rovelli’s ideas. The Order of Time to provide some kind of organizational framework for the novel’s themes, also suggesting how we can read it side by side The Essex snake.
“Things go, and they return,” Thomas says at one point; after that, he tells us “I have the strangest feeling that things don’t happen one after the other, but all at the same time”. Novels are time machines: their job is to measure events over time. What Perry has done in this serial, intelligent and moving book is to create a kind of quantum novel, a novel that asks us to question traditional linear narratives and recognize instead what is always present in Perry’s luminous vision of Essex: the truth, beauty and love. .
• Enlightenment by Sarah Perry is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
