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A Novel
by Sarah Perry
Book Reviewed by:A dazzling new work of literary fiction from the author of The Essex Serpent, a story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community.
It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.
A thrillingly ambitious novel of friendship, faith, and unrequited love, rich in symmetry and symbolism, Enlightenment is a shimmering wonder of a book and Sarah Perry's finest work to date.
Excerpt
Enlightenment
Monday: late winter, bad weather. The River Alder, fattened by continuous rain, went in a spate through Aldleigh and beyond it, taking carp and pike and pages torn from pornographic magazines past war memorials and pubs and new industrial parks, down to the mouth of the Blackwater and on in due course to the sea. Toppled shopping trolleys glistened on the riverbank; so also did unwanted wedding rings, and beer cans, and coins struck by empires in the years of their decline. Herons paced like white-coated orderlies in the muddy reeds; and at half past four a fisherman caught a cup untouched since the ink was wet on The Battle of Maldon, spat twice, and threw it back.
Late winter, bad weather, the town oppressed by clouds as low as a coffin lid. A place spoken of in passing, if at all: neither Boudicca nor Wat Tyler had given it a second glance when they took their vengeances to London; and war had reached it only as an afterthought, when a solitary Junkers discharged ...
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. 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...continued
Full Review
(1008 words)
(Reviewed by Isabella Zhou).
The central mystery of Sarah Perry's Enlightenment concerns an astronomer, Maria Văduva, and Thomas's uncovering of her hidden scientific contributions. Many real-life historical women partook in exploration of the night sky and space only for their discoveries to be similarly buried or forgotten. One such woman was the nineteenth-century astronomer Maria Mitchell.
Mitchell was the first American astronomer to discover a comet. She was born on August 1, 1818, the third eldest of ten children, to William and Lydia Mitchell in Nantucket, Massachusetts. As Quakers, Mitchell's parents believed in equal education for all children regardless of gender, in a time when the schooling of girls was highly limited, and sent her to ...
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