Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt review – an exquisite tale of first love

The Guardian

24-04-2025

Seán Hewitt, the author of two acclaimed poetry collections and an equally acclaimed memoir, now publishes his debut novel Open, Heaven – a tender, skilled and epiphanic work which I suspect will meet the same response. It takes its title from William Blake's poem Milton, which speaks of wandering through 'realms of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty' – a line that quite nicely describes the reader's experience of this book.
Its opening recalls – with the sense of a deliberate engagement with literary tradition – TS Eliot's Four Quartets, or LP Hartley's The Go-Between: 'Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly … the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms in reverse.' Our narrator James, a librarian who loved but never desired his husband, is a man arrested in time past. Directed by doctors to rest after the 'bewildered weeks' that follow his divorce, he returns endlessly to thoughts of his youth, 'hoping to find the answer to something left unfinished'. He searches online for properties in the village of Thornmere, where he was once a solitary teen who loved – with disastrous single-minded loyalty – a boy called Luke. He discovers a farmhouse for sale which is achingly familiar; so he is prompted to return to Thornmere in person, having never really departed it in spirit, and we are plunged into the body of the novel.
Now it is 2002 (some readers will be disquieted to discover this now constitutes 'the past'), and young James is shy, proud and sullen, earning pocket money on the milk round, while negotiating his sexuality and his attachment to his parents, and to a little brother prone to frightening seizures. Early one autumn morning while delivering milk, he encounters Luke seated on a pile of hessian sacks and flicking ash from a cigarette. His questing and troublesome need for the company and desire of men has found its apotheosis: immediately his life becomes one of 'soft sexual delusions', as his friendship with Luke becomes increasingly intimate and complex. 'I had come to find love,' he says, 'knowing it would deplete me … what was that, if not bravery?'
This other boy is lithe, untidy, and blond; he is wounded by an enforced separation from his father and given to carelessness and tempers, but capable of watchful kindness and vulnerability. Hewitt's depiction of an enthralled and uncertain love is painfully convincing. James watches for signs his ardour is returned, and often thinks he sees them – 'I imagined an ocean of thought, a hidden spring of love, and I thought … he would let me in.' His suffering is particular and universal. His gayness is never peripheral, and it makes his love for Luke perilous: 'I could not imagine a time when I would not have to hide my desires,' he writes. But there is never the sense that James, as a gay character, must be a gay cipher, either suffering nobly or flourishing decadently for the instruction and entertainment of heterosexual readers or characters; he is not expected to represent anything other than himself.
There are events here – mysterious figures in dank tunnels, and near-catastrophic accidents – but the novel's chief propulsion derives from observing James's developing consciousness. We are wiser than he is, or certainly ought to be, and this ironic distance compels the worried reader on. Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute depictions of the natural world, which he confers with Lawrentian significance: the 'bright sky-blue blankets of forget-me-nots … ruched in the dappled light' are all of a piece with James's burgeoning and secretive sexuality, his 'sweet sordidness'. This is not an author submitting to the tiresome notion that a good novel is one which does all it can to efface artistry, or to slip down the gullet with as little flavour or friction as a glass of tap water. The prose is worked at, just as a painting or concerto must be worked at – the imagery is fitted exquisitely to the mood, the structure designed to trouble the reader with the rapid fluidity of time, the events all plausible, but contained within the novel's atmosphere.
I was arrested by the presentation of a version of Englishness which is perhaps best arrived at by some remove. Hewitt was born in Warrington, but lives and teaches in Dublin; his mother is Irish. There is consequently a sensibility at work here which is intricately familiar with and fond of a particular kind of Englishness, which in clumsier hands might appear trite. There are sparrow-scattered hedges, horse chestnuts, rugby clubs, bonfires, farmhouses with patterned china ranged on the dresser, and boys fishing for perch in the canal – all of this treated without the embarrassment that might plague a British novelist, and offset with equally English images of desolate underpasses beneath main roads dividing village from village, or of loose tarpaulin flapping on a half-derelict barn. It roots the novel both geographically, and within the canon of English literature: Hewitt is never imitative of Hardy or Lawrence or Gerard Manley Hopkins, but allows the novel to speak into their echoes.
In both his poetry and prose, Hewitt seems to me to be working, with immense fidelity and skill, towards a singular vision, in which profound sincerity of feeling – and the treatment of sexual desire as something close to sacred – is matched with an almost reckless beauty of expression. What is that, if not bravery?
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.