Genre: literary fiction
Published: Mariner Books, May 2024
My Rating: 3.5/5 stars
“So I told her this: that it's true I've only rarely been happy, and perhaps more often been sad. But I have been content. I have lived. I have felt everything available to me: I've been faithless, devout, indifferent, ardent, diligent, and careless; full of hope and disappointment, bewildered by time and fate or confused by providence--and all of it ticking through me while the pendulum of my life loses amplitude by the hour."
The Story:
We follow the remarkable friendship between Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay, over the course of 2 decades, as the two are united and ripped apart by chance and faith again and again. We meet the two in 1997, in their Essex birth-town of Adleigh, where both have lived all their lives. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. The two are pulled into different directions, when Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees a hardship and moves London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit.
Review:
I have an interesting relationship with Sarah Perry’s work. On paper, I adore all the themes she consistently weaves into her stories: the dichotomy of science vs religion, tradition, (non-)conformity and unrequited love in various forms. On a sentence-by-sentence basis, I’m often in awe of her skills as a writer. Even when it comes to her motifs (science and folklore in The Essex Serpent, language and mythology in Melmoth, and now astronomy, physics and the stars in Enlightenment), we should get along. Yet there’s something that keeps all her books from being 5-stars for me. I like them just fine when I’m reading them, but the second I finish the story, it already starts to fade away from me.
That was the exact experience I had with Enlightenment too. I loved the writing and enjoyed the story of two souls that meet again over time, but never quite seem to collide, like two comets in overlapping orbits. Yet I can already tell that by the end of this year, I won’t remember any specific scene that took place. The story meanders and floats a little too much for my liking and never feels (pardon the pun) grounded enough to make the impression it might have otherwise made.
The characters and the writing on a technical level are the highlights here for me. I’m a little split on the ending. It was either beautifully written, slightly too sentimental or a little bit of both.
Enlightenment is an easy recommendation, as it’s so in line with the author's signature style. If you loved The Essex Serpent and/or Melmoth: there’s more where that came from here. If Perry’s style wasn’t for you in those novels, don’t expect Enlightenment to be all too different.
Find this book here on Goodreads.
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