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In Drizzly England, a Tale of Sex, God and Celestial Bodies
In the latest novel from the “Essex Serpent” author Sarah Perry, astronomy and religion collide with unrequited romance under gray British skies.
David Leavitt is the author, most recently, of the novel “Shelter in Place.” He is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Florida.
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ENLIGHTENMENT, by Sarah Perry
No country takes as much pride in its own dismal climate as England. In “Enlightenment,” Sarah Perry’s aggressively English new novel, the word “weather” appears 50 times. Twenty-two times, including in the opening sentence, the weather is “bad.” Once it is “stormy,” once “unsettled,” once “disrespectful,” once “troubled” and once “English” (“the nothingness of English weather”).
On the other hand, the weather is “good” only five times, “fine” once, “mild” once and once “good for hunting.” Its sunny title notwithstanding, “Enlightenment” has an unremitting cloud cover hanging over it that seems to be as much generated as suffered by its protagonists, like the storm cloud that follows poor Joe Btfsplk all through Al Capp’s comic strip “Li’l Abner.” Yet who is the author of these private discontents? Is it God? Is it other people? Or is it the sufferers themselves?
“Enlightenment” is an abundant novel, not easy to summarize. Set in Perry’s native Essex (“the drab colors of the Essex soil,” “the sullen Essex clay”), it involves a plenitude of characters, most of them affiliated with Bethesda, a strict Baptist church in the fictional town of Aldleigh, and has two major plots that are loosely threaded together. In the first of these, Thomas Hart, a secretly gay author of little-read novels and local-color newspaper columns, enters into an improbable friendship with Grace Macaulay, the almost feral daughter of Bethesda’s pastor. In the second, a 19th-century Romanian astronomer named Maria Vaduva discovers a comet.
As “Enlightenment” moves, in decade-long leaps, from 1997 to 2007 and finally on to 2017, Thomas finds himself becoming increasingly obsessed with Maria, whom he believes to be the “Lowlands ghost” of local legend, and who has left behind a trail of evidentiary breadcrumbs that have a maddening habit of disappearing, being stolen or catching on fire. Soon Grace becomes caught up in Thomas’s pursuit of the enigmatic Maria, as do James Bower, the affable museum curator with whom Thomas has fallen hopelessly in love, and Nathan (he is given no last name), the weed-smoking maladroit with whom Grace has fallen hopelessly in love.
It goes without saying that neither of these loves is requited; in Thomas’s case it’s because James is straight (improbably, it takes Thomas 10 years to discover that he has a wife), and in Grace’s it’s because Thomas, ostensibly for her own good, has contrived to separate her from Nathan.
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