Just as for his remarkable memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, Sean Hewitt has borrowed the title of his debut novel from another poet, writes Conor Hanratty.
Darkness came from Gerard Manley Hopkins, while Open, Heaven begins with a quotation from William Blake's Milton. It lists various flowers opening and awakening, while "men are sick in love". In Blake’s poem, this springtime catalogue comes with Biblical lamentation, while the great poet Milton looks on. As a programmatic introduction, this could hardly be more precise; Hewitt has written a novel of sexual awakening, of the English countryside, of sadness, and of intensely poetic observation.
The lovesick narrator, James, is prompted by a property listing to visit the small northern town where he grew up. The melancholy awkwardness of returning to a place one no longer inhabits is wryly observed. But this uncomfortable visit is really just a framing device, a trail of breadcrumbs and oblique clues which intimate to the reader that James survived his childhood, left this place, and built a life elsewhere. The heart of the novel then takes us back a few decades to James’ late teens, when he falls in love with Luke, the nephew of some family friends. Luke’s family life is complicated, resulting in his stay with his aunt and uncle for the guts of a year. The bulk of the text recounts this formative, life-changing period.
As romantic heroes go, Luke comes equipped with the full starter pack; he is blonde, lithe and beautiful, with arresting eyes and a cheeky gap in his teeth. He is a bad boy with a troubled family, he’s a little bit older, and he loves breaking the rules. Meanwhile the delicate, well-behaved James has recently come out and is increasingly isolated from his classmates and his well-meaning but frustrated family. James has an immensely attentive eye and ear. (His precocious, beautiful observations of nature, of birds and flowers, sunrises and sunsets, are perhaps to be expected from the pen of a poet as talented as Hewitt.) James’ ability to understand and even sympathise with the characters around him, particularly his mother, are surprising in one so young, but Hewitt pulls this off, perhaps, by blurring the lines between past and present in the distance from which James tells his story.
Hewitt has written a novel of sexual awakening, of the English countryside, of sadness, and of intensely poetic observation.
The encounter between James and Luke is captivating and frustrating - just as tempestuous teenage infatuations tend to be. The softness and generosity with which Hewitt describes the story, with which he allows James to go through this inescapably important love affair, are what make the book particularly special. It is not Luke that the reader falls in love with, but James. Like the Duke in As You Like It, he "finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." For James not everything is good. There are ominous shadows at home, around the bonfire, under bridges and at the school disco. But throughout, Hewitt writes with immense love of the landscape, like Shakespeare before him. One description of a dew-laden evening towards the end of the book is little short of breathtaking.
Open, Heaven ends more than once, as Hewitt gives us gentle conclusions for both parts of the timeline. But his point is that some loves are so influential that we cannot get over them. They stay with us, timeless, and cast their shadows over our past and future love affairs. Like walking through a folksong (the novel's loveliest image) our loves can haunt and perfume our days. Hewitt removes the lamentations from his quotation of Blake, and likewise keeps the saddest portions of his story unsaid. We know they are there, of course, but what remains are the flowers, the poetry and James' awakening. Heaven, indeed.
Conor Hanratty is an opera and theatre director. Open, Heaven is published by Penguin.
