Sarah Perry’s third book. MelmothIt remains, in my opinion, one of the most complex and brilliant novels of the last few decades: a serious and unforgettable attempt to grapple with the darkest elements of the 20th century. Perry is still best known for Essex SerpentA bestselling tale of science, faith, and monsters in late 19th-century England. His extraordinary and ambitious fourth novel, enlightenmentIt can be considered a combination of the previous two books, almost a sequel. Essex Serpent and it contains regular, uncanny echoes Melmoth.
The book opens in 1997, with Comet Hale-Bopp high in the sky above the (fictional) Essex town of Aldleigh, just upriver from the Blackwater marshes and the half-drowned (and also fictional) village of Aldwinter. Essex Serpent. Our hero is the unlikely figure of Thomas Hart, a 50-year-old bookish, gay and columnist in The Guardian, “an Essex man for his sins”. Essex Chronicle. “He had the melancholy pious air of a priest stripped of his robes”, and this is no surprise: he lives a double life, going to London to recruit and then returning to sit in the pews of the Bethesda chapel, a congregation of Strict and Strict. Private Baptists.
Perry himself was raised a Strict Baptist, and one of the bracing energies of this novel is the way he deals with that dissident legacy: his fondness for community and the moral clarity of the church, while also recognizing that living with their God is, as one character puts it, “as if they were sweeping a broom if they heard anything upstairs.” “It’s like there’s a tenant to knock you down,” he said. The novel traces the friendship between Thomas and Grace Macauley, a young girl in the congregation; She grapples with the contradictory demands of her faith and the allure of teenage life as a bright, quirky, inquisitive young woman who feels like a version of Perry herself.
Reluctantly at first, Hart is persuaded to begin writing a column on astronomy in the magazine. History. We read these columns realizing how Hart finds a kind of religious joy in the stars and the physics that controls their path across the sky. “I had become a citizen of the lunar empire,” he writes in his first column. Later we read: “When he understood Kepler’s laws, he was almost moved to tears at such meticulous beauty.” While studying quantum mechanics, he discovers that it “has all the quirks of theology.” Towards the end of the book, Thomas realizes that “the sky at night offered him a ritual, and he attended with great devotion to the incomprehensible beauty of its syllables and propositions”: the redshift, the blueshift, and the smooth movement of the stars.
In this layered, clever and affecting book, Perry has constructed a kind of quantum novel
The Bethesda chapel is located near a ruined country house called the Lowlands. There are rumors of a ghost, a woman, lurking in the background of old photographs. Thomas has written about her in his columns, and he is approached by James Bower, the curator of the local museum, who thinks he has discovered the woman’s identity. He believes her to be Maria Vñduva Bell, a Romanian who married the wealthy owner of the Lowlands. Through a collection of diaries and letters, we build a picture of the enigmatic Maria, herself an astronomer and still in love with a poet in Bucharest.
There’s also love in the late ’90s narrative: Thomas falls for James (who is decidedly heterosexual), while Grace meets a flirtatious fellow student named Nathan. Meanwhile, another Romanian appears: a wandering priest with a dark past who could help solve Maria’s mystery. There are two major scenes here, both potential tragedies: one sees the Plains laid waste, the other is more temporary and intimate, although the repercussions of this are felt throughout much of the novel. We revisit Thomas, Grace, and Nathan in 2008 and then again in 2017; Each time we experience the feeling of stepping into a world that is both completely changing and held together by the same fundamental forces.
There is a remarkable moment in the 1997 chapter of the book when Thomas, Grace and Nathan go to visit Aldwinter together. Walking in Cora and Will’s footsteps feels like a pilgrimage. Essex Serpent. This points to one of the novel’s deeper themes: movement and time. Perry mentions Carlo Rovelli’s work in his acknowledgments, but instead of using the theoretical physicist’s work to lend weight to Thomas’s journalistic musings on science, it reads like Rovelli’s work. Order of Time It provides a kind of organizational framework for the novel’s themes and also suggests how we might read it. Essex Serpent.
“Everything passes and returns,” Thomas says at one point; he later tells us: “I have a very strange feeling that things are happening all at once rather than one after the other.” Novels are time machines; their job is to measure events in time. What Perry has done in this layered, clever and poignant book is to construct a kind of quantum novel that asks us to question traditional linear narratives and instead recognize what is always present in Perry’s brilliant vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love. .
• Enlightenment This piece by Sarah Perry is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support Guardian And Observer Order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply