Enlightenment by Sarah Perry review – cosmic strangeness

This defiantly old-fashioned tale of two misfits, a ghost and a blazing comet showcases Perry’s unerring capacity to make the earthly new and strange

How do you quiet a warring soul? Every one of Sarah Perry’s novels has grappled lavishly with this question. Fate v free will; doubt v certainty; science v God. The metaphysical battleground is Perry’s literary terrain. She cannot seem to escape its gravitational pull, nor the estuarine mud of her home county. And so it seems only fitting that the Essex author’s new novel, Enlightenment, is a tale of orbits, collisions and other cosmic ellipses: inescapable loops.

We begin in the winter of 1997 in the fictional riverside town of Aldleigh, a version of Chelmsford, where Perry grew up. This was a decisive year for Britain: the year of Tony Blair and the New Labour landslide, the handover of Hong Kong, and Princess Diana’s funeral pageantry. But the only event that interests Perry is celestial: the blazing arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet. Enlightenment has its neck cricked upwards, its eyes full of moonlight.