Whoops, I misread your post – I should have written “you” rather than your husband, that is, I agree with your comment above that “maybe it’s like James Joyce’s Ulysses - a highly acclaimed literary work that is very hard to read!”
To your point: Sarah Perry’s novel Enlightenment was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Telegraph , the Washington Post , and The New Yorker .
From the interview with Sarah Perry that @jerseysouthmomchess posted:
Who are your heroes?
My childhood hero was Gladys Aylward, the working-class girl who travelled to China to be a Christian missionary and helped end the cruel practice of foot-binding.
Gladys Aylward was the protagonist in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness by Alan Burgess. I loved the movie with Ingrid Bergman when I was a child. Anyway, I mention it as something to tuck away for later, if we are looking for a classic we haven’t tackled yet.
By no trouble, I don’t mean I liked the specific practices of Bethesda. It’s too bad that Grace’s father didn’t speak up for Thomas. What I liked was that I think it communicated very well, what I see as an outsider as the attraction of religion and of Christianity in particular. Lorna is clearly meant to be an awful character.
What did you think of young Nathan? He seemed like a nice enough kid, but not one to inspire 20 years of pining. I wonder if Grace’s insistence that Nathan was her one true love was another way in which her conservative Christian upbringing peeked through. He was the boy to whom she lost her virginity, so he must be viewed as a great, unmatchable, mythical love — only that perspective would soften the “sin” of what they had done. By the way, Nathan means “God has given” — deliberate choice by Perry, I’m sure.
Nathan is both attracted and repelled by Grace:
So here was the body that preoccupied him against his will, concealed somewhere in the folds of grubby cloth — here again the bewildering sense of attraction and repulsion she roused.
He has the above thought as a teen, but it’s the same feeling when they meet again as adults, and he succumbs to the attraction and lets Grace lead him to her bed, against his better judgement.
I wondered why Perry made Nathan disabled as an adult — at first, I thought maybe I was supposed to be picking up on some underlying symbolism. Then I read an article about Sarah Perry:
…she’s just done an hour of weight training, her defence against the “tormenting pain” that immobilised her between the ages of 34 and 38. “I used to see people walking,” she says, “and the act seemed to me as incredible as flight…in the words of my neurosurgeon, I had the worst imaginable disc rupture in my back and the best imaginable outcome [from surgery], because I can now pick up 115kg. I have a lot of nerve damage in my left leg, and if I don’t weight train, I start falling over, because my foot starts to twist in.” Sarah Perry: faith, telescopes and the perils of pigeon-holing writers | Sarah Perry | The Guardian
That’s Nathan’s injury! He tells Grace:
“Then two years ago I fell while walking, and two disks here, just here”—he patted himself, was rueful, offered her a smile—“ruptured. I was thirty-six and that was the last day I was young.”
He adds, “the nerve was damaged, and now my foot won’t work.” Thomas observes that Nathan’s "left foot turned faintly in.”
So Sarah Perry is writing what she knows, but whether or not it also means something thematically, I can’t say.
Well, that is exactly what Nathan suffered. I , also, wondered why Perry created , not one but TWO injured men, both hobbling with canes in the final chapters of this book.
Were we to feel more sympathetic towards them? I did.
Now three weeks after reading this book, and two distinct events remain vivid.
When Thomas, turned Nathan away during Grace’s baptism, effecting the rest of her life. At the time I felt he was being protective, father like, and Nathan seemed abusive and a cad towards lonely Grace. I didn’t think highly of Nathan.
How did you feel about this pivotal moment and Thomas’ action at the church?
The second event, was when Grace, full of venom, and hatred outs Thomas, publically at the funeral. It was so mean, the most vicious hurtful thing she could do.
She fell from Grace at that moment, but eventually is forgiven, and finds redemption, as does Thomas.
Somehow having Nathan, impaired, needy, and Thomas, limping and frail, made them more sympathetic to me at the end. ( but the entire reunion at that village seemed too neat and tidy)
Speaking of outing people, does anyone share my delight at Maria Vaduva’s eventual acknowledgement for her discovery despite her apparent with to remain anonymous? I’m struggling with the moral obligation to the deceased’s wishes here.
This one has been challenging and I’m not going to finish it. Only made it 1/3 of the way through. I’m glad to see I’m not alone. I also didn’t like the long paragraphs and slow movement of the story. On to the next choice.
Maria Vaduva Bell is a fairly agreeable literary ghost. She isn’t scary or disruptive, and she provides some unobtrusive companionship for our friend Thomas.
I think the main reason she was haunting him was because she wanted to be made known – she realized that her wish for anonymity was foolish.
At any rate, I believe it was foolish. Her reason seemed anti-feminist (out of character for her) and generally not very sensible. She tells Cora:
When this comet is falsely named for its false discoverer you will keep your silence–and when you die, you will inter the comet with you–so the depth of my love may be measured by the height of what I have lost: they will say what a love that was, that she loved him more than her comet and more than her own name!
Here’s the thing: If her mysterious M truly loved her, he would never want her to do such a thing. And if he was a rogue who didn’t love her, it was a big mistake to throw away her life’s achievement for him. I think she came to her senses in the afterlife; hence, the haunting of Thomas. And Thomas sees it the same way:
“If Maria wanted her secrets kept,” said Thomas, averting his gaze from the woman who walked beside him in forbidding silence,“she ought to have known better than to confide in a writer, for whom the whole world is nothing but a store of sentences” (p. 361).
Unrequited love becomes almost an obsession with all three central characters – Maria, Thomas and Grace.
Thomas writes about unrequited love in one of his unsent messages to the late James Bower:
…in the ordinary way we love because we’re loved, and give more or less what we’re given. But to love without return is more strange and more wonderful, and not the humiliating thing I’d once taken it to be. To give love without receiving it is to understand that we are made in the image of God–because the love of God is immense and indiscriminate and can never be returned to the same degree. Go on loving when your love is unreturned, I said, and you are just a little lower than the angels.
This is a lovely sentiment and I admire Thomas’ way with words. However, he presents an ideal that isn’t realized in Grace or Maria. Both women allow their unrequited love to shrink them, rather than expand them in a way that reflects “the immense and indiscriminate” love of God. Grace is bitter and Maria unhappy; only Thomas seems to have a more philosophical, affirming perspective.
I’m glad the two of them begin to find some common ground again at the end, but I’m still bothered by the fact that Grace’s punishment did not fit Thomas’ crime – barely a crime at all. He simply gave a stern parental shake of the head to discourage a boy who didn’t really want to be there anyway.
Even if misguided, Thomas acted with Grace’s best interests at heart. Grace, on the other hand, is as deliberately cruel to Thomas as she can possibly be.
Honestly, I think, deep down, what Grace can’t forgive is the fact that Thomas is gay. Her father forgives Thomas this “transgression” because he is very religious, and Nathan shrugs his shoulders at it because he is not very religious. But Grace falls somewhere in the middle; she can’t quite shake off the teaching she has been raised with.
“When I realized, I moved away as if I’d seen a spider on the wall…They told me men like that were wicked. And I try and try to think Thomas is wicked, but I can’t, it’s like trying to write with my left hand.”
It’s like she’s mad at him for messing with her world view. She says she’s angry because of Nathan, but if she’s upset about her thwarted romance, Nathan is the only person she should be directing her ire at.
I agree Thomas was acting in the best interest when he sent Nathan away, but didn’t he lie about it, or omit telling Grace the truth. She was so devastated, thinking she was used, unloved, and disrespected for all those years. Finally, when Thomas confessed, and I don’t recall when that happened, she was rightfully angry.
So it was the deception that was the “ crime”, as I recall. Perhaps I’m remembering incorrectoy.
shouldn’t have read this one weeks ago.
You’re right – Grace was angry about the deception. If Thomas had told her what he’d done immediately after the service, she would have stomped her feet, hollered at him, then run off to find Nathan – and the teen romance would likely have resumed for a while, then burned itself out.
Ten years earlier, Grace was upset because she felt like Thomas lied to her (by omission) regarding his homosexuality. She tells young Nathan:
“First I was angry with myself for thinking badly of my friend, then angry with Bethesda for making me think badly at all, but in the end I was angry with him. He should have told me. People should be what they seem to be. If they’re not, they’re liars, even if they never lie!”
I’m not sure I agree with her logic, but it does foreshadow her outsized response to finding out about the other deception a decade later.
Popping in to say I’m still reading – or should I say still struggling to finish? Because it’s not in my nature to leave a book unfinished, (I can count the number of times I’ve done that on 1 hand) I’ll get it done. I’m currently at 75% on my Kindle. It’s doubtful my opinion will change when I do finish, so I can easily say I didn’t/don’t like it. How is it possible to pack a book with so many unlikeable characters?
I’ll be back in a couple of days.
You know what character really didn’t work for me? The young woman who lights the letter on fire, then later sets Lowlands House ablaze, then still later gives a hidden document to Thomas, then immediately after that throws herself in front of a train. Unless I missed something, she didn’t have any kind of relationship to any character – just showed up repeatedly as kind of a deus ex machina to do something that the plot needed in order to move along.
As mentioned above, Enlightenment was very positively reviewed. Here is one of those (with just a few critiques). I’m posting it because it’s a clear, “summarizing” review, which might be enlightening (ha ha) for anyone who set the book aside, but is still sort of following along with our discussion:
I’m one of those. I told friends I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on and I was almost 20% into it. Still about at 85% now and it got better. But not a favorite.
That’s a great review
“Enlightenment is gauzy and unhurried, a genteel novel of inner space. It’s luxuriously – defiantly – old-fashioned.”
“Thomas would leave Bethesda were it not for Grace Macauley,”
“Thomas and Grace see each other clearly, which gives them the power to protect one another, but also to inflict the deepest of wounds. Is it possible to love someone you can never forgive?”
“while Maria’s “black-browed” spirit berates them from the shadows. It’s not the greatest of mystery plots – far too reliant on serendipity – but this is a book about the capriciousness of the stars.
“That is both its charm and its greatest weakness. Had Hale-Bopp appeared in a different decade, or century, I suspect Perry would have written exactly the same book. It’s the comet that matters to her, not post-Thatcher politics. It is hard to shake the feeling that Perry has taken a narrative she loves, and a spectacle she wants, and thwacked them together out of astronomical necessity. I was charmed by the book’s cosmic strangeness, but bothered by its queer cliches. It’s so wearying to confront yet another tale of exquisite, chaste gay loneliness.
I don’t think she had any right to be angry. While I agree this seems more 80s behavior than 1997 behavior, my friends who were in the closet in college (70s) would send me formal letters in the late 80s or 90s. BTW I only knew two people who were openly gay when I was in college. Different times. Grad school in NYC a few years later was completely different. Others were just friends until it was obvious that they weren’t just friends, and there was no formal announcement. Or they didn’t come out until they actually had a steady significant other. It’s a pretty awkward conversation, that shouldn’t have ever needed to be a conversation at all. Anyway, I think Thomas loved his church and kept his London life separate from his village life. Grace wasn’t part of his London life so didn’t need to know.
Here is a review, stating what many of us here, have commented about, half way Perry seems spinning out of orbit 
( loses her way )
“It’s a celebration of glorious storytelling, bursting with rich imagery and stuffed full of big existential themes about love and loneliness, science and faith and what it means to really live one’s life. But it also loses its way in the middle section, before winding its way back to a satisfying end. There is one moment where Perry gives Thomas, who is a writer too, the line, ‘he cannot bring the book to its conclusion – it is all a question, and no answer. What can he say to his readers but ‘I wonder’?‘ If felt prophetic, coming as it did around the three-quarter point of the story. Did Perry know how to end her own story?
Enlightenment | Sarah Perry – This Reading Life “
It’s possible this novel will make a better movie than experience reading it.
With the right screenwriters, and Jeremy Irons as Thomas, and an actress like the one who played the quirky receptionist in Doc Martin series, funky, boho clothes, and unconventional - Jennifer Lawrence l
I see Timothy Chalemet as bad boy Nathan.
It’s a unique story, a gay man bonds to a baby girl, their love story, and god, science, cosmos themes , might be better on big screen that within pages of the book.
I didn’t think Grace was so mad about Thomas being gay, but he lied to her about Nathan and hid his sexual orientation. I think she was mad about the deception.
H