Enlightenment
- committee53
- Jul 15
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 16
Reviewed by James Phillips
Sarah Perry (Jonathan Cape: 2024)
If I were to ask you how close science and religion are to each other, you may instinctively view them as opposites; repelling like magnets and defining each other through their polarity. Sarah Perry, author of the hugely celebrated The Essex Serpent, explores how they may not be as divergent as they present themselves. Her latest novel, Enlightenment, explores the entanglement of such binaries – a world where they collide.
The premise follows a journalist, Thomas Hart, set to task by his editor to explore the heavens with an astrological event set to grace the skies of Ardleigh in Essex. Albeit begrudging, his eyes are soon opened to the celestial heavens, becoming a ‘citizen of the Empire of the Moon’. Perry’s solar system of characters comes to the fore, including the young and forthright Grace Macaulay, and her gravitational attachment to her church whilst the mysteries of the town wane and wax like the weather of the small Essex Town.
Love, too, is analysed and magnified; when looking up to the infinite, one can’t help not also looking in. Whilst the first part of the novel follows the trajectory of a comet overseeing the happenings of the community, as a reader you feel this is a palpable presence; the world conjured by Perry’s superb and enchanting use of personification. But with first and unrequited love, loss follows suit, further propelling us into vast and complicated territory of emotion, not just the interstellar.
Exploration of these big questions surrounding God, the mechanics of physics and the heartache of love, come sharply into focus through the novel’s driving force. Orbiting around the town’s abandoned mansion, ‘Lowlands’, slowly sinking into the Essex mud, its ghost, we are soon introduced to, is Maria Văduva, a ‘mad’ woman who disappears towards the end of the 19th century. This mystery that Thomas endeavours to untangle becomes equally as engaging, with peaks and troughs a catalyst and galaxy for the characters to inhabit. Who she is, her importance and why she disappeared correspond closely to the forces just over 100 years later and make for (shock horror) enlightening and inescapable masterpiece where humanity and astronomy meet in unity.
‘What moves me on? What moves you? It comforts me to think we’re all in motion, helpless against the forces of time and fate. We are just like the earth, I think “insignificantly small”, as Kepler said once, “but borne through stars”’ (p.50).
We look forward to welcoming Sarah Perry in September at Eastern Angles. Tickets are selling fast, so do make sure you get yours. I greatly look forward to discovering the inspirations, designs and secrets behind this novel so rich in luminary style. It is no wonder it was Booker Prize longlisted last year, and is a novel I will be shouting about for a long time to come.
Sarah Perry will be talking to Suffolk Book League at an event at Eastern Angles theatre on Wednesday 17th September 2025.
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