“Five hundred words please,” Thomas Hart’s editor tells him in the opening chapter of Sarah Perry’s newest work Enlightenment, “and six if the night is clear.”
The night is clear, folks.
It hadn’t occurred to me that a discussion with Sarah Perry at the Edinburgh Book Festival would require Perry to actually read from the book she was there to promote. As she opened it to the last page- an odd place to start, but by the very nature of the book it is one that could be placed anywhere with similar effect- my heart clenched. I wasn’t ready. I was still too raw, the pain of finishing the book still too near to delve back into it. Like Perry admits herself, Thomas Hart, the genteel writer awakened to the wonder of the stars, has taken over her soul as well as mine. Enlightenment has such a grip on me that to hear any part of it spoken in a room full of other people feels somehow sacrilegious. I was not ready.
There is something personal in Perry’s writing that reaches out and says ‘come here’, a quality that I am delighted to say extends to her conversation with Richard Holloway at Monday’s Festival discussion. She has an easy humor and a guiding tone, her answers coming easily and eloquently. Enlightenment, she says, had been a “terribly humbling” experience. She had become used to a prickling feeling in the skull whose consequence was a plot and characters within the hour, but no such luck with this one. Her first attempt had resulted in a slim novel that her editor pushed back across the desk with the advice to “go write a Sarah Perry novel”.
A Sarah Perry novel can be many things, but you can be sure at its heart will be an exploration of science, religion, and their abilities to interact in the same space. She would be happy, she told Holloway, to write three-hundred pages simply on coincidence and the strangeness of life and faith and meaning, but the format of the novel does demand things like plot and character. Thankfully she has fashioned the perfect guide in Thomas Hart, a fifty-year old gay man who lives with one foot in London, where he allows himself his true nature, and the other in the Essex town of Aldleigh, where he attends the Bethesda Strict Baptist church, sitting in the same pew he has his entire life. Hart represents several dichotomies at once: the conventional and the modern, the worlds of the living and the dead, and most importantly, science and religion.
To call these dichotomies is perhaps begging the question. Perry, herself raised in a Calvinist household with a six-year Creationist father, considers the idea of predestination, the idea that at birth you are one of God’s elect or else resigned to eternity in hell, particularly cruel. “It’s like a tossed coin,” she told Holloway, “And on the other side is despair.” The five points of Calvinism, which Perry could recite and elaborate by age seven (“thanks, dad”), did not stand up to scrutiny even as a small child. Perry is not, however, an atheist. Faith is “the vessel that water is poured into,” she says, “It is the shape of my belief.”
The Enlightenment period (which started, we were reminded, in Edinburgh), was a time of great scientific innovation that was at its heart powered by a belief in a rational god. Thomas Hart, at his most Sarah Perry, describes god as simply looking for god. It is in common grace that Perry seems to find her god these days. “If one person kicks a cat, and one person saves someone’s life,” she says, “And at the same moment, they look up at the sky and see a comet, that is available to both of them, that is common grace. We are visited constantly by the beauty of the universe, and we can transfer that to others.”
Perry has successfully transferred that beauty in Enlightenment. She told a story of how, during Covid, she experienced her ‘first light’- a term used to mark one’s first look through a telescope- with M42, a nebula in Orion’s Belt that left her so awed she had to look away. Perry’s love for the skies started at a young age, watching Haley’s comet with her father in Essex, a moment so transcendent she had it tattooed below her heart. When asking her father if he remembered this, he told her it had never happened. In fact, no one in Essex had seen Haley’s comet; the conditions were terrible. She had conflated the memory with one of Hale-Bopp, and it had solidified into a core memory without her realizing. But, she says, “my love for the comet was real, even if it was a mistake.”
Thomas Hart isn’t real, but I can’t deny the place he has taken up in my brain. It was Thomas Hart that took me to the Waterstone’s after this talk, looking for the least frightening book on astronomy and star-gazing. It was Thomas Hart that insisted, despite the city lights, I at least attempt to view the Perseid shower that invisibly flew overhead these past evenings. It’s Thomas Hart who reminds me, in Sarah Perry’s words, that the moon in a puddle is the moon and a puddle but it is also become a third thing now, and how lovely is it that we get to see it? When you look up at the sky, says Perry (or Hart?), “you are not looking at the universe. You are in it.”
Once again, Perry and her work manages to remind us exactly where we are: here.
Erin Murray Quinlan is an American playwright, amateur beekeeper, and proud confirmed solver of ‘Cain’s Jawbone’. Her full biography can be found at erinmurrayquinlan.com.
