A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed

As ghosts go, Maria Vaduva, who haunts Enlightenment, is not a patch on the wild, tormented figure who stalks the pages of Sarah Perry’s previous novel, Melmoth. Where Melmoth, in rage and despair, haunts everyone complicit in history’s horrors, Maria is crossly plaintive. The disappearance of this unrecognised 19th-century Romanian astronomer from Lowlands House, a manor in the fictional small Essex town of Aldleigh (where marriage has brought her), becomes the obsession of Thomas Hart.

‘Right everyone. It’s 7.59. Phones at the ready. Let’s see if we can get Bob a GP appointment.’

He is an unlikely columnist of the Essex Chronicle, and Enlightenment’s central character. It could be said that he is at odds with life and that achieving harmony (on Earth and in heaven) is the novel’s underlying theme. Hart has a double life, living straight in his home town and gay in London. Also, like his young friend and kindred spirit Grace Macauley, he is a semi-lapsed member of the Bethesda Baptist Chapel.