On Enlightenment

I picked up this novel after seeing it mentioned in the New Yorker’s end-of-year recommendations for 2024, and having read a handful of Goodreads reviews first, I came away far more impressed than some other readers seem to have been.

Enlightenment centers on two characters around whom many threads converge. The more significant is Thomas Hart, a columnist at an Essex newspaper who takes up astronomy and chases the mysterious Maria Văduva, a Romanian astronomer who left almost no trace behind; his story is tightly bound up with Grace Macauley, whom he helped raise in his local church, Bethesda. The novel works through love, aging, curiosity, legacy, faith, chance, and — most significantly — Providence. Most of those themes are common enough in fiction today, but Providence has somehow fallen out of fashion. I’d long assumed it was best understood as God exerting active agency over the world; there’s some truth in that, but it’s too simple. These days I think of Providence as the physical, spatio-temporal incarnation of the logos — the natural order of all things coming to fruition exactly as they must, since it’s impossible for things to be otherwise. (Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations was remarkably helpful to me here.)

The logos pervades the book, and approaching it through astronomy is a wise choice; astronomy may be one of the best visual representations of the logos there is. The planets move in their orbits and, from where we stand, nothing really changes: everything is circular, repeating and repeating forever, and there’s a determinism to it. The cosmic bodies don’t choose to move as they do — this is the watchmaker’s universe, where God draws the blueprint and the universe executes the script. Sarah Perry handles all of this with attention and care. The book is full of coincidences, or, as Jung would call them, “synchronicities” — to Jung not chance at all but manifestations of a deeper order, a person’s inner state mirroring the outer world exactly as the Hermetics say it must. There’s something deeply spiritual in it, and it draws the characters back toward faith even when they resist.

Perry handles aging deftly, too. I’m thirty, younger than any of the characters are by the end, but like Thomas Hart I sometimes feel that “things happen not one after the other, but all at once. [. . .] I can’t explain it, only tell you that this afternoon I’m a young man in winter and someone’s handed me a baby at a funeral — but also that I’m fifty, and the man I love is here and the sun is going down — and also that I’m older than I am now [. . .] Everything still happens within me — how else can I make sense of time?”

The least compelling thread was Maria Văduva’s, though I understand its need to drive the story, and it was a more interesting engine than other MacGuffins might have been. The characters are interesting and meaningful, but it isn’t really they who move the book; things tend to happen to them. You could read the real protagonist as Providence itself, surfacing through the Văduva mystery — neither plot nor character carries the novel without it, and yet it doesn’t feel like a crutch so much as another layer of the book’s meaning. Some reviewers complain about how often we hear of Thomas’s hip, Lorna’s satin, Maria’s pearls, Nathan’s leg, Grace’s dresses; fair enough, it does get repetitive. But I found those small, recurring details worked as motifs that helped me see each character — their signature qualia, the thing that kept them straight in my mind. I loved the book, and I’m looking forward to whatever Perry does next.