As ghosts go, Maria Vaduva, who haunts Enlightenment, is not a patch on the wild, tormented figure who stalks the pages of Sarah Perry’s previous novel, Melmoth. Where Melmoth, in rage and despair, haunts everyone complicit in history’s horrors, Maria is crossly plaintive. The disappearance of this unrecognised 19th-century Romanian astronomer from Lowlands House, a manor in the fictional small Essex town of Aldleigh (where marriage has brought her), becomes the obsession of Thomas Hart.
He is an unlikely columnist of the Essex Chronicle, and Enlightenment’s central character. It could be said that he is at odds with life and that achieving harmony (on Earth and in heaven) is the novel’s underlying theme. Hart has a double life, living straight in his home town and gay in London. Also, like his young friend and kindred spirit Grace Macauley, he is a semi-lapsed member of the Bethesda Baptist Chapel. Semi-lapsed, because, as Grace remarks, to abandon chapel would be like ‘abandoning our bones’. Both characters retain a ‘longing for the sacred’.
Enlightenment opens in 1997, the year of the Hale-Bopp comet. As in her other novels, Perry deals with time by using letters, reports, diaries, found scribbles and, in this case, the seemingly interminable columns of the Chronicle, which take us through to 2017. In a way, the novel follows on from Perry’s much-garlanded The Essex Serpent, in being concerned with the conflict between faith and science. Fans of that book will be pleased to find the naturalist Cora Seaborne and the handsome minister William Ransome making posthumous appearances here.
Maria almost becomes ghost-in-residence in Hart’s home. His quest to find out who she was and why she disappeared leads him to a study of the moon and the orbits of the stars – likened to the orbits of an individual life. This allows him to arrive at the belief that worshipping the stars and worshiping God are much the same.
There are a lot of ideas in Enlightenment. In part it is both a meditation on loneliness and a serious study of unrequited love. Hart falls for the head of the local museum, the happily married James Bower; Grace falls for the sixth-former Nathan, a boy who, free from the Baptist upbringing of Thomas and Grace, has ‘the ease of a creature never told it was a sinner from the womb’.
In her ghostly way, Maria, too, is a survivor of unrequited love. The story, such as it is, is driven by the quest to discover who Maria was and to validate her discovery of a comet. Though more exotic than the real-life astronomer Caroline Herschel (sister of William), who discovered seven new comets, the fictional Maria is somehow less interesting.
There is very little action in this long, somewhat overwritten novel. The religion- science conflict has perhaps lost its currency, and has now become more psychologically sophisticated than Perry portrays it. How-ever, recent news about the James Webb Space Telescope, which apparently can look back into the beginnings of time, gives Enlightenment’s exploration of astronomy a needed dash of contemporaneity.
In a final column from the Essex Chronicle, Hart writes: ‘I’ve heard it said that at the first sip from the glass of the natural sciences you become an atheist – then at the bottom of the glass, God will be waiting for you.’ One can hope. Meanwhile today’s astronomers have discovered what they call ‘ghostly particles’.
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