‘I supplement God with physics, and understand each as well as the other. Which is to say: not in the least! But I find it magnificent, knowledge piled on knowledge, and the matter never closed – it’s all no less strange and marvellous to me than the Resurrection, and it takes as much faith for me to believe it.’ [p. 191]
Set in Essex in the 1990s and later, in the town of Aldleigh (just up the road from the village of Aldwinter, now deserted, which was the setting of Perry's best-known novel, The Essex Serpent), this is the story of Thomas Hart, confirmed bachelor and columnist for the local Chronicle, and Grace Macauley, the pastor's daughter. Both worship at Bethesda, the local Calvinist chapel, though Thomas struggles to reconcile his homosexuality with his faith ('in Bethesda I’m the worst of sinners, and in London I’m the strangest of saints'). After a chance assignment he takes an interest in astronomy, just as comet Hale-Bopp is approaching.
A previous column by Thomas, about the ghost that's rumoured to haunt derelict Lowlands House, leads to a meeting with James Bower, curator of the local museum. A bundle of documents has been found at Lowlands: would Thomas be interested? Very much so: he and James, and to a lesser extent Grace, become fascinated by the author of the diary, Maria Văduva, who seems to have vanished from history around 1889. And Thomas is also fascinated by James...
Thomas takes in an old Romanian exile with ruined hands, found sleeping rough in the grounds of Lowlands, who has some things to say about faith and its absence. He translates the diary of Maria Văduva Bell -- revealing her as a Romanian, an astronomer, a woman who married a wealthy man because the man she loved did not love her. Perhaps that's why Thomas, who knows something of unrequited love, makes a decision that will affect the rest of his life.
Enlightenment is a novel about faith and physics, about the importance of being loved: about women in science (Cora Seaborne, fossil-hunting heroine of The Essex Serpent, is mentioned), about the tension between religion and modernity, about the ways in which a spectacle such as Hale-Bopp can bring people together. Perry's prose is magnificent, and often beautiful: her characters felt utterly real, and their intellectual and spiritual journeys were intriguing and profoundly satisfying. I loved this novel and suspect it will become a regular reread.
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