Enlightenment by Sarah Perry – Comets, Stars and Dodgy Quotes

The ‘cosmic question mark’ in an image taken by the James Webb Telescope

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry is a Booker Prize nominated novel published in 2024.

Thomas Hart, a journalist on a local newspaper in Essex, becomes fascinated by astronomy after his editor asks him to write a column on the subject. With a museum official, he investigates a nineteenth century woman, a past resident of a nearby country house, who may have been a keen amateur astronomer, and unacknowledged discoverer of a comet. The story follows Thomas’s investigations, and his attempts to accommodate religious feelings with both his scientific interests and the austere church he attends, which obliges him to hide the fact that he is gay.

This book is much concerned with making it appear that science and religion are not at odds in exploring life’s unknowns.

Was it persuasive? Well I don’t know. Some of the science religion parallels were certainly interesting. There was the irony of a rigid church dealing in universal mysteries, reminiscent of the apparently rigid business of science revealing all kinds of weird stuff, like enigmatic, shape shifting electrons that seem to be in two different places at the same time, (don’t ask) and a universe so vast that you can’t get your head around it. That said, I also felt the theme felt forced. Late in the book Thomas Hart ponders on a quote dubiously attributed to scientist Werner Heisenberg, of the famous Uncertainty Principle.

“At the first sip of the natural sciences you will become an atheist – then at the bottom of the glass God will be waiting for you.”

Thomas admits the attribution to Heisenberg might not be correct. From what I can see, doing an internet search, it’s almost certainly incorrect. This use of a very dubious quote to equate science and religion was indicative of straining too hard around this equivalence theme.

The book was better for me in the first half, poetic in its descriptions of astronomical phenomena up there in the sky above Essex. The second half was harder work. And as I say, the main theme sometimes seemed forced. Science revealing uncertainty is not the same as science revealing God, which seems to be the implication.