There have been a flood of excellent new books this year from familiar authors, but the two I kept checking bookshops for were Bridget Collins’s The Silence Factory and Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment. These are currently only available in hardcover, but I treated myself, and was not disappointed.
Both Collins and Perry have stepped into new waters with these titles, not only in terms of style, and genre in Collins’s case, but also in their readiness to talk about the role religion has played in their lives.
Sarah Perry was brought up in a Strict Baptist household, and Enlightenment explores the complications that come with feeling the powerful draw of religious community whilst also being intellectually and sexually divergent from it. Enlightenment is an expansive book about experiences with the cosmic sublime, the occultation of women’s contributions to science, queer sexuality and unshakeably deep-set yearnings for religious community.
Having been brought up in a rigid Baptist church, I was struck by the authenticity of Perry’s narrative. Whilst allusions are made in The Essex Serpent, this is the first time Perry has ventured so close to her own religious experiences. Enlightenment to me is a kind of reconciling, a coming to terms with the past, and the figure of Grace seems to demonstrate the lasting value of forgiveness.
Grace is a name which carries particular weight in Baptist circles because salvation comes through grace alone – sola gratia as the sixteenth-century Reformers would say. Yet the word has deeper resonances, as grace is the precise freely given, unconditional love which the characters fail to extend to each other. Thomas betrays Grace by sending her lover away in order to keep her dependent on him. When she finds out, Grace is utterly ungracious, outing Thomas as queer to their homophobic community and shutting him out of her life.
Disunited, heartbroken and cut off from their religious community, doubting Thomas and graceless Grace live lonely lives. Bethesda Chapel, for all its strictures, seems to have offered a solace which they will always limp without. What is left is work, wonder at the night sky and seeking for better – for the ‘pilot light’ which, it seems, can be seen as much in a comet’s shimmer as through fervent religious belief.
The Silence Factory picks up where Enlightenment leaves off, with the magic of the natural world, secreted homoerotic desires and the heavy cultural weight of religion, class and patriarchy. The story begins with the diary of Sophia, a repressed woman with an overbearing husband, James, who drags her all over the Mediterranean in pursuit of an elusive species of spider. However, on the Greek island of Kratos, Sophia meets Hira, who is everything James is not: embodied, a healer and a free spirit.
James’s rigid, authoritarian Christianity stands in stark contrast to Hira’s earthy spirituality. Whilst James haplessly drags Sophia through the jungle, Hira is at home in the ocean and reveals the mysteries of the island and sorority to Sophia. Hira, like her namesake, is protectress of the women around her, bringing wisdom and healing to Sophia’s body and mind.
In the parallel plot, Henry goes to Telverton in the hope of making a life for himself away from grief and his nagging father-in-law. What he finds there is in fact James’s heirloom, a factory of silk spun by spiders stolen from Kratos. The factory owner, Sir Edward, is greedy and cruel, yet Henry is infatuated with him and blinded to his moral failings. Only at the very close of the book can Henry face up to the ugly truth: Telverton silk is woven through the exploitation of non-human nature, colonised peoples and the working classes.
This is where Collins’s own religious convictions come to the fore. Collins is a practising Quaker, Quakers being a mystic religious community who emerged in the seventeenth century and were known from the start for their commitment to employee welfare. In The Silence Factory, when Henry destroys the spider house on which the silk factory relies and then falls ill, Quakers take him in and care for his physical and emotional health.
When Henry is at last well enough to leave, he dreads returning to the life he hates in London, but is counselled against it by a fatherly Quaker. Instead of soul-dulling filial duty, Henry is encouraged to build up lost connections with his daughter and make a new life for himself in the North.
The end of the book is excitingly open. Henry heads off on unknown roads, a whole life behind him and another ahead of him. He is just beginning to live adventurously, and, what is most surprising to a modern Western mind, it is a religious man who encourages him to it. The Silence Factory thus presents a refreshing, restorative kind of religion; it seeks beyond the letter to the warm, thrumming heart of being, and opens up a mind-soul-bodyful of possibilities.