Absorbing and affecting ... Thanks to the economical grace and emotional force of Ms. Perry’s writing, we are also held fast by other crises, inserted like tiny detonators in her narrative. Death and desolation, though all too familiar, are freshly affecting ... A novel of ideas, however, as well as one of emotion ... It is hard to think of another modern novelist who portrays religious faith with such intelligent sympathy.
Abundant ... Has a lot to say about God, goodness and celestial bodies. It’s told from a celestial height by an orotund if unnamed narrator, who moves fluidly among the points of view of at least half a dozen characters ... To quote the very British Basil Fawlty, 'Too much of a good thing always leaves one wanting less, I always find.'
Novels are time machines: their work is the measuring of events through time. What Perry has done in this layered, intelligent and moving book is to construct a kind of quantum novel, one that asks us to question conventional linear narratives and recognise instead what is ever-present in Perry’s luminous vision of Essex: truth, beauty and love.
Perry has always produced gorgeous prose, and she has found a new, ethereal register in this book ... 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.
It can be exhilarating but it can also feel like indulging a charmingly precocious child who has wandered downstairs at night to describe their feverish dreams. Fascinating, delightful, amusing — for the first hour. Then you just wish they’d go to bed ... I can’t remember a novel that elicited such contradictory impressions — that of being stirred so often by the exquisite sentences while being so bored and baffled by the story ... Some readers will find all this melodrama more to their taste. I soon palled at the coincidences and strange accidents, the fires and false jeopardies, and reached the end with something like relief.
A lip-twitching humour infuses Perry’s metaphors ... Reminds us that suffering is the human condition. Yet it is also a heartfelt paean to the consolations of the sublime, where religion and science meet.
A book by an author at the top of their game ... This is a fat, satisfying, grown-up novel – rich in plot, characters, ideas, structure, and atmosphere. Most writers only really deliver on a few of those; in this book about astronomy, faith, and devotional love in all its forms, Perry leaves none behind ... Perry feeds the scientific principles and ideas discussed within the book into both its narrative structure and emotive, effective metaphors – a clever trick, but not a cold one ... The prose reads gloriously, though the many repetitions of certain descriptors come to weigh the storytelling down – lampshades looking like moons is a useful detail once, but becomes distracting when you keep on meeting it. But this is to point out one wrong stitch in a sumptuous tapestry: Enlightenment hangs together as a resplendent whole, shining like a night sky.
This is a rich, surprising book that dazzles and dizzies the reader ... A book that on the one hand marks its interests clearly — how humans connect, how they find meaning — with strong dialogue and appetising set pieces. But it also takes an indirect route into the reader’s head, so that it can seem elusive and even confounding ... Yet the peculiar intelligence driving the novel is all Perry’s own. Above all, Enlightenment is a book that doesn’t compromise, and is all the more interesting as a result.
Stunning, multilayered ... With brilliant storytelling, Perry’s novel of dichotomies portrays how elliptical our lives are—very much like the movement of the stars.
Inventive, atmospheric ... Many of Perry’s sentences are startlingly beautiful, creating an atmospheric sense of setting and character. If some of Enlightenment’s goings-on are a bit elliptical, and if some secondary characters feel a little wispy, not quite coming into focus, that too seems part of the novel’s aim and its charm.
Enchanting ... Perry’s affection for her characters, even in their most flawed moments, adds to the fullness of their realization, as she makes it abundantly clear that the faults and frailties that distinguish them lie not in the stars but in themselves. Perry magnificently evokes the wonder of the cosmos.
Swiftly sketched but fully realized secondary characters give the novel a social texture more commonly found in Victorian literature, an impression bolstered by Perry’s intricately layered prose. Much of the story is sad, but a radiant finale suggests reconciliation and renewal. Thoughtful, sensitive, and beautifully written.
