It seems appropriate that Sarah Perry chooses to meet in a road named Tombland. The author of The Essex Serpent is very much alive to the echoes of the dead. “My approach to time,” she says, cheerfully, “is that I have never felt the present is particularly important.”
We are in Norwich, where she lives, in Shiki, a Japanese restaurant directly opposite the cathedral. Perry has been a regular here for years. “They used to do a night, I think it was a Tuesday,” she says,- with a giggle, “when it was all you can eat. You got given this pile of little scraps of paper, and you would tick what you wanted and give it to the waiter. We never came back for a while after that because we were so embarrassed about how much we’d had. We still have the pile of papers to shame us in my husband’s study.”
She orders pretty much from memory – a bento box “because I like the little theatre of it” –, and some sashimi and tempura, and a jug of warm sake. She’s hungry, she says, because 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.” She had two conditions. One, the autoimmune disease Graves’ disease for which there is no cure, has been mitigated by drugs. “And at the same time,” she says, “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.” She’s 45 now. “Essentially, I’m so lucky. I feel like I’ve aged backwards.”
That period of profound illness, which coincided with Perry’s bestselling breakthrough as a novelist, deepened her instincts toward the gothic that had been shaped by a childhood of strict and cultish religious fervour, in a Calvinist Baptist church in her native Chelmsford, Essex. (“For example,” she says “if we were on a train on a Saturday and it was delayed, we would get off the train before midnight, so we weren’t making the train driver work on the Lord’s Day”). Those habits of mind have never left her: “Christian thinking is like the vessel into which I’ve been poured,” she says. “What happens now is I try to think about everything from first principles but there are no first principles. And so in my writing I’m forever circling around precepts of grace and redemption…”
Her books are only in the very broadest sense autobiographical, but they each examine in different page-turning ways what she calls “the split in her consciousness” between faith and doubt, certainty and freedom, that caused her abruptly to leave the church when she was 27, and to follow the alternative vocation that she had felt since she used to make up stories for one of her four older sisters in the bottom bunk of their shared bedroom.
Over our lunch, I can begin to imagine the little girl she was; words and stories pour out of her. A friend once told Perry that she was the only person they knew who spoke with semi-colons, and you don’t spend long with her to feel the truth of that. She puts it down to having had to learn big chunks of the King James Bible about as soon as she could speak. Her speech, like her fiction, loops in unexpected directions. By the time our food arrives we have moved from discussion of double decker bento boxes to the great love of her life – and local hero – Alan Gordon Partridge, to theoretical physics and its relation “to experiences of the sublime and the ecstatic and the ghostly”. “There’s nothing about the material of this room that is ordinary,” she says, waving a chopstick toward the restaurant’s minimalist interior, “if you stop to actually think about what particles are doing.”
There is a lovely tension between the cadences of Perry’s chat and the esoterics of her mind. She enjoys her Essex girl heritage and in 2020, three years before becoming chancellor of Essex University, she wrote a sparky and erudite book-length deconstruction of the county caricature of dumb blondes, a stirring manifesto “for profane and opinionated women everywhere”.
That same tension comes across in her books which mix the mundane with the otherworldly. The latest, Enlightenment, explores the relationship between a repressed gay man with a late life obsession with astronomy and a young woman in a Baptist congregation not unlike the one she knew. The story of a Victorian mystery seeps into their interactions over several decades, along with a framing of quantum mechanics. If she were a man, she suggests, her books might be categorised as “magical realism”, but because she’s a woman, they tend to be labelled “fantasy”. Snobby pigeon-holing does them a disservice. She launched Enlightenment – and its compulsive examination of the limits of faith – in the towering gothic cathedral across the road and was terrified she would be reading to four people in the front row; in the event it was a packed house. Her book was subsequently longlisted for the Booker prize.
“The thing about Norwich is that you can’t cross the road without bumping into a writer,” she says. “The day after the Booker nomination, I was a bit dazed by it all and I told my husband I was just going to go and watch Deadpool & Wolverine at the cinema. Walking in looking equally pale, was Ferdia Lennon who had just won the Waterstone’s prize [for Glorious Exploits]. I said: ‘Are you escaping here, too’? He was, so we ostentatiously sat at opposite ends of the row and watched the Marvel film.”
The reverence for astrophysics – a useful substitute for religion – in her current book is ingrained, she suggests from childhood. As well as being a Calvinist, her dad was a keen amateur astronomer. “He was born and brought up in slum conditions, in south London,” she says, “kicked out of school at 14. But he had a neighbour who gave him this huge book called 1001 Pastimes for the Modern World. In it, he discovered how to make a telescope with a rolled-up magazine and two lenses from an old pair of spectacles, and so on. He did that when he was maybe 12, and ever since he’d had this love for the stars.”
Her father went on to study physics and became a materials scientist, and because she was the only one of his children who seemed interested he was always teaching her about focal lengths and orbits. “He was really formidable. And I think one of the reasons I had a slightly maybe easier relationship with him was because I was interested in the things that he loved.”
That love of astronomy never went away – she has a tattoo of Halley’s comet over her heart – and in a quirk of fate that would not be out of place in her fiction, she bought a powerful telescope in February 2020, “and then a month later, the world stopped” and the night skies – suddenly untroubled by passing planes – resumed a former serenity. The book she was writing – Enlightenment – became “more and more about the stars, and my love for them”.
It’s part of a life in which, she says, “all I ever wanted to do was sit alone in a room and write sentences that other people on the other side of the wall or the other side of the world would read and feel what I was feeling and see what I was seeing”. That dream came true. In her opening salvos as chancellor at Essex, she has been scathing of government ministers wanting to limit and demean the humanities in favour of immediately job-friendly Stem subjects. Her life shows how both can be triggers to industry and creativity.
A few times over lunch she expresses that deep-seated antipathy for authority figures who seek to confine that spirit, such as the church elders of her youth. “Take publishing,” she says, as we are getting ready to leave. “It does kind of welcome working-class writers, but they are expected to write gritty fiction about having a smack addict mother, and how they clawed their way out of poverty. Actually, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson, these people who had working-class backgrounds have no rein on their imagination any more than upper-class people do. They have breathtaking powers of language…”
It’s the day on which the government has planned to ban smoking from outdoor spaces. Continuing her spirit of civil disobedience she suggests she will pop outside for a smoke, while I settle the bill.
Enlightenment is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
