Looking up Thomas Hart lives in 1990s small-town Essex, writing novels and local newspaper columns. Comet Hale-Bopp’s approach is big news – and transformative for Hart – as we learn in the moving story Enlightenment, says Emily Wilson
SARAH PERRY is a writer most famous for The Essex Serpent, recently made into a high-end TV show on Apple TV+. Perry, being neither a sci-fi author nor a science writer, has until now given us no cause to include her on these pages. Her new novel, Enlightenment, however… the clue is in the title.
In this gorgeously written, witty and very moving novel, our hero Thomas Hart is a man of the arts, a novelist and a columnist at the Essex Chronicle. He is also a gay man who regularly attends a chapel in the small town in Essex where he lives, with a congregation that considers being gay a sin. He is close friends with the worshippers there, including a teenager called Grace who he has been looking out for since she was a baby. These chapel friends don’t know Hart is gay, nor what he does when he takes trips to London.
Our story begins in 1997 when, at the age of 50, Hart is asked by the paper to write about astronomy. Comet Hale-Bopp is approaching and astronomy is having something of a moment.
And so our hero looks up at the sky and takes his first steps into science. Very quickly, he is transformed into a passionate amateur astronomer, and his new interest breeds new adventure. He begins to investigate a local mystery involving a 19th-century female astronomer. Through this investigation, he meets a man, James, at the local museum and falls in love, although he can’t be sure that James feels as he does. Meanwhile, Grace finds love of her own and the wheels of our story are set spinning. I won’t say any more about the plot, except that it spans decades and Hale-Bopp isn’t the only comet to feature.
