Book review: Light touch always present in a story that is about love, pure and simple

Irish Examiner

15 hours ago

Seán Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven is a queer coming-of-age novel set in a northern English village in 2002.
Hewitt conveys the emotional intensity of late childhood and adolescence so well.
The teeming excitement at your sexuality ascertaining itself, the uncertainty of launching yourself forward as an individual, of wondering what the shape of you might be.
We first encounter James returning to the village where he grew up, considering buying an old farmhouse.
As he looks around, he is brought back to a formative summer. Surely, we all have one.
'Time runs faster backwards. The years-long, arduous, and uncertain when taken by one, unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow-encrusted garden.'
This novel reminds me of Edmund White's iconic A Boy's Own Story in that both protagonists look back and explore the loneliness of queer adolescence, the feeling of being outside the swim.
Yet, most of us can identify with that early grappling for identity. The wanting to be wanted.
'I could smell the heat off him, could almost taste him in my mouth. I was trapped there, part resentment, part pure pleasure, so close to him, so close to his power, that for a split second I thought perhaps he wanted me to kiss him.'
Open, Heaven is a more innocent book than White's A Boy's Own Story. Sixteen-year-old James is a gentle, shy boy who loves his family, yet he often feels smothered by them.
Hewitt draws the son's attempt to break away from the mother figure particularly well, his stiffening in public when she embraces him.
In White's novel he viscerally charts the self-loathing of the queer boy who in the 1950s wanted to be loved by men and to love them back but not to be 'homosexual'.
James in Open, Heaven does not share that fear, and there is a limited measure of societal progress.
James comes out to a family who are gently supportive, although the attitude of his schoolmates remains challenging.
While the self-loathing is happily absent, there is still that sense of being cut loose and alone.
He is effectively ostracised because of the outside world's persistent homophobia.
James must navigate his queerness in a predominantly straight world.
Into his life comes gorgeous Luke, who becomes the lightning rod for his desires. Luke's sexuality remains ambiguous.
James brings him a page from a porn magazine hoping that Luke might think of him as a girl.
Luke is a troubled magnetic boy with an absent mother and a father in prison.
Adults perceive him as a troublemaker. And so, we see two outsiders draw close.
The backdrop to the book is, if not economic deprivation, quiet rural poverty and the struggle to make a living.
It occurs to James that his family may not be able to afford to turn on the heating, and he faces a two-hour walk to school.
The novel is not laden down by plot. I personally enjoyed the focus on the interiority of the protagonist's life.
A profoundly moving bond forms between the boys. The ending had me almost reaching for a tissue because it is about love, plain and simple.
This is never a dark book because the light touch is always there, and it is the better for it.
How exhausting it must be for queer adolescents to so often see themselves depicted on the page as only tortured and struggling.
Hewitt's debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, was published in 2020 to much fanfare. Since then, he has produced a book a year.
He is also an assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin and a darling of the critics.
Born in England to an Irish mother and an English father, his sensibility feels midway between both cultures.
Open, Heaven is written with lyrical delicacy, featuring beautiful Hardyesque descriptions of nature with an intimate tone. Hewitt is a poet at heart, and it leaps from the page.
'And then across the village, there came the high metallic notes of the church bells pealing, as if the sound, as if time itself, were being pulled upwards, brightly, into the sky.'
I couldn't recommend it more.