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The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt review – an exquisite tale of first love
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 Delivery charges may apply.
New Statesman
23-04-2025
- New Statesman
The road that built England
Photo by Charles Hewitt/Picture Post/Whenever the A1 road is widened to accommodate ever more traffic, to become the A1(M), archaeological work must be undertaken and, to no one's surprise, skeletons emerge. The North Road opens with its author at Catterick, working with a trowel to unearth long-dead Romans. After all, the A1 began as Ermine Street, built to give the Romans access to York. And, as every schoolkid knows, the Romans built good roads. In the 1700s, Daniel Defoe wrote that a section he travelled was still 'paved in stone', which is to say, original. Now it is four lanes of tarmac, of course. Or whatever modern roads are surfaced with (ideas of surfacing and resurfacing recur in this book). For most people, most of the time, it's just a way of driving from A to B; a continuous lorry-scape. But for Rob Cowen, over his decade of research, the Great North Road became a kind of Earth god. His excavations led to a many-layered, multi-textured exploration of the whole road, and slippages of time are his forte. He travels south to north, discovering and exhuming ghosts and presences along the way. It's all there, on the A1, from Roman skulls to Covid. Like the source of a great river, its starting place is a little doubtful. Most agree on Smithfield, the meat market where droves of animals died. From there, the road lights out through London's medieval Bishopsgate and into a strange and fascinating land. Cowen's explorations, what we might term psychogeography, were often done on foot. Wisely perhaps, he trekked in the company of a friend who is a soldier, timing his walks with his friend's home leave. The two often camped within earshot of the road, often in ghastly weather. Foxes barked, wind lashed the trees, the stories and the interest kept coming. Everyone crowds the road, and also these pages: St Cuthbert, William the Conqueror (or William the Bastard, if you were a native), Oliver Cromwell, Dick Turpin, the postal service, even TS Eliot. Cowen calls Eliot the 'great poet of the Great North Road' and Four Quartets a 'highway hymn'. ( Little Gidding lies a little west of the highway.) There are many personages whose names we know, as well as the nameless dead, but Cowen also notes that the A1 has secret encampments. North of London, migrant workers sleep in roadside woods before they slip back into the city to labour. There are mouthy barmaids, strip malls, graffiti and the never-ending traffic; all the stuff of our own strange century. The Iraq War features, and Brexit. As for Covid, the 'Kent variant' spread itself upcountry via the Great North Road. Though the book is richly historical, Cowen's North Road is also personal. He has never lived more than a few miles from it. He has young children, and understands that the road's archaeological and temporal layers are made of families like his own. They really were his own: one of the book's strata concerns his Cowen forebears, generations who were miners, shopkeepers and fishmongers, and who trudged up and down between Doncaster and the Smoke as their fortunes waxed and waned. Economic migrants, we'd now say. Another layer concerns his teenage years and the emotional shutdown he went into after his parents' divorce when he was 16. With friends he formed a band, they went gigging and drinking up and down the same A1, hoping it would be the road to fame and freedom. Having involved himself in the music industry, he moved to London, and recalls how in 2005, following the bombings when 52 people were killed and the transport systems shut down, he joined the crowds trudging home on foot. It was, he notes, the Great North Road that he followed. It's strange to think that, for 1,900 of its 2,000 years, the Great North Road had no motor traffic. For 1,600 of its years, there was not even a stagecoach. When the coach was introduced, along with it came inns and stables and staging posts. Many still exist, albeit half-forgotten where the road's route has shifted to bypass villages. Cowen seeks them out, ghostly places sometimes. The stagecoach dominated until competition arrived in the shape of the first postal service. These new, faster 'night mails' were all dark glamour – lamplit and pulled by plunging horses. The guard at the back was, Cowen writes, like a rock star: 'think Mick Jagger in 1968, bedecked in scarlet coat with blue lapels'. De Quincey travelled by night mail: 'Bagging a seat by the driver as these coaches tore up the highway was, in De Quincey's estimation, 'worth five years of life'.' In 1600, it took four days to get from London to York. By 1830, it took a mere 20 hours. But then the railway came, supplanting horses, and soon to be supplanted in turn by motor traffic and its ever-increasing demands – hence the present 'upgrades' to A1(M) status, and the Roman skeletons. Gradually, we edge north; that is the way the road runs. No one in Edinburgh speaks of a 'Great South Road' although many took it, not least James VI (and I), heading for London and the English crown. Cowen writes that the king on his journey was entertained most lavishly at Huntingdon by one Oliver Cromwell, uncle of the parliamentarian. Cromwell the younger was likewise a child of the North Road, and he features in a chapter entitled 'Leave/Remain'. Again time slips. 'One of the most striking disclosures from the Brexit vote has been its sporadic echoes of the civil wars… unquiet history stares us in the face. Brexit burst into flame from sparks struck over similar tinder.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe For the length of the road, 'its present tense and its mirroring of past tensions' are vividly explored. The sheer amount of material Cowen amasses would overwhelm many, but he handles it deftly. His writing is vivid, elastic, driven on like a stagecoach with many a verbless sentence. He stretches the bounds of 'non-fiction' with sections spoken in voices he discovers along the way, of people from other times. There is the imagined testimony of James Hind, highwayman and royalist, 'dictated' in 17th-century English somewhere between Ickwell Green and Huntingdon. There is a marvellous multi-page prose poem spoken by the genius loci of Stretton: 'the road changes. It grows wider, thicker… shadows upon shadows… I see things I can't be sure of. Flashes. The road overgrown. Crops burning. Smoke on the horizon… I have no sense of time as you do… time is not as you understand it. I wait…' We could be in the Roman invasion, the Norman conquest, the civil war, the future. The North Road is a wonderful achievement. There have been gazetteers and motorists' guides, but this is different. With its voices and histories, its excitements and discoveries, its memoir and its sense of time circling back even as it heads north at 70mph. Cowen writes: 'Is it not to try and restore some sense of enchantment that we are out here walking the road?' Enchantment is restored. And in doing that, Cowen has perhaps found his country's elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but in an ever-changing, ever-active, thundering dual carriageway. It begins in uncertainty and ends in a different nation. Brilliantly, The North Road is everything. It is 'England and nowhere'. Rob Cowen appears at Cambridge Literary Festival on 26 April The North Road Rob Cowen Hutchinson Heinemann, 416pp, £22 This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here [See also: Steve Reed: 'Reform is a symptom of broken trust'] Related
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Europe is running out of hope Trump is still open to persuasion over Ukraine
In the Four Quartets TS Elliot wrote 'humankind cannot bear very much reality'. At moments in history like these when there is simply too much head-spinning change and too many postwar assumptions being ripped from their mooring, it sometimes appears too much for any human to absorb, let alone offer a response. In particular the weeks between JD Vance's speech to the Munich security conference to the moment when Donald Trump cut off all US military aid to Ukraine, a concept is being tested – and possibly to destruction – that the US president remains open to European persuasion. For many, the consequences of viewing Trump as more allied with Russia than Europe has simply been too momentous to contemplate. The belief in a close relationship between western Europe and the US that has dominated government policy in, for instance, Helsinki, Berlin, London and Rome is being put under intolerable strain . The pressure is especially acute for Keir Starmer, much lauded for the calmness with which he has tried to retain focus on the essential objective of keeping the US in alliance with Europe over the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. The task is so difficult because the British military, political, intelligence and foreign policy establishment has made practical support for Ukraine a centrepiece of its Russian policy for over a decade. Now Britain's greatest ally seems set on the destruction of that decade's work. For the Foreign Office this is not just disorientating, but akin to suddenly living in a world without maps. When Starmer was asked on Monday afternoon by the Scottish Nationalist MP Stephen Flynn about reports that Trump was about to withdraw aid from Ukraine, the British prime minister replied he had not seen those reports, assuring 'that is not their position'. Not many hours later, Trump's supposed confidant in Europe was on the phone to the US president – and Downing Street will not say whether the he informed Starmer of his plan even then. Moreover, reports started appearing that the US was about to lift some sanctions on Russia, a step that would lift the siege on the Russian economy so painfully constructed over the past three years. Trump's steps are an undeniable reverse for Starmer, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and all those cast in the role of 'Trump whisperer' or bridge between Europe and Washington. But even now they insist there is no alternative but to remain engaged, and to urge Trump to understand his hectic timetable to a ceasefire benefits only Russia. Yet late last week it appeared as if advocates of engagement were winning, since the Starmer trip to Washington had gone as well as possible. The theatrical production of an envelope containing an invitation from King Charles to a state visit and the promise to raise defence spending by 2027 was met with the suggestion of a free trade deal that would probably put the UK in a better position than the EU. The holy grail – known as the benefit of Brexit – had finally been found. But like Emmanuel Macron, who had travelled to Washington two days before, the unhappy truth was that Trump had evaded Starmer's central request to provide a US military backstop to a European force operating inside Ukraine after a ceasefire. The only security guarantee that was needed, Trump insisted, was the guarantee that the US would have an economic stake in the future of Ukraine's rare earth and energy resources. No amount of summit optics could avoid Trump's refusal to commit US military assets. Nor was it possible to overlook that US diplomats on the day of Macron's visit twice voted with Russia at the UN, both at the general assembly and the security council. As Bronwen Maddox, the Chatham House director, pointed out: this was the first time the US had voted against Europe on a matter of European security since 1945. The abuse administered to Volodymyr Zelenskyy two days after Starmer's visit – although a diplomatic disaster best avoided – was merely a confirmation that Trump will let nothing and no one stand in the way of his strategic aim of restoring relations with Vladimir Putin. The abandonment of Ukraine, fuelled by his personal animosity to Zelenskyy and the cost of the war to the US, has become a means to the greater end, a new relationship with Russia. It is here – according to the interpretation of Russia - that tensions with Europe are at breaking point. Where Trump draws on his personal relations with Putin to insist Russia will abide by a ceasefire, Europe instead looks at Russia's practice of breaking agreements, the point Zelenskyy sought to make in the Oval Office with disastrous effect. Where Trump sees a convivial leader an ocean away, Europe sees a tyrant on its borders. Where Trump sees peace, Europe sees subjugation. These are not perceptions that Starmer can square. Take Finland, a new member of the Nato alliance that is sharing a border with Russia. Speaking at Chatham House on Tuesday its foreign minister, Elina Valtonen, laid out with calm precision that for all Finland's Atlanticist instincts, it could not accept a peace that meant submission. 'There can be no sustainable peace in Ukraine without a strong and sovereign Ukraine,' she said. 'This is not just the political reality, it is a moral imperative. Rushing to a deal at the cost of its content, and without due consideration of the consequences, would endanger not only Ukraine, but also Europe – and, by extension, the United States for generations to come. 'We Finns know Russia. Russia shares a land border with 14 countries. Only one of them has constantly remained an independent democracy through the second world war and the cold war, and that's Finland. History has taught us that Russia respects only strength and resolve. Russia's current war is based on imperialistic ambitions that go beyond Ukraine. The Kremlin's appetite does not diminish when fed, it only grows. 'Take it from us. Whatever happens in this war, Russia will remain a long term strategic threat to Euro Atlantic security, rather than encouraged.' Valtonen said there was a need to be open for re-engagement in the future, if Russia starts to adhere to international law again. 'But going forward, it would be a mistake to let go about deterrence or rebuild strategic dependency on Russia, and this goes for all of Europe.' She warned: 'One of our foremost diplomats and later president, [Juho Kusti] Paasikivi, was on several occasions on the other side of the table from Stalin and Molotov when our existence as an independent country was on the line in the 1930s and 1940s. 'He summed it up well: 'The constant policy of the Russians is to get what they can with as little as possible and then come back asking for more … They never sacrifice their immediate interests for future objectives … They are immune to any ethical, human or abstract legal factors.'' 'This is the Finnish experience. The Ukrainians know from their own experience that Russia has broken every single commitment they have ever made on Ukraine's sovereignty. No agreement with Moscow can stand without the will and the means to enforce it.' But despite this clear-eyed assessment of Russia, shared by the Baltic nations, Valtonen, like Starmer and indeed many European politicians, is still reluctant to criticise Trump in public. Valtonen admits this is because Europe may not yet have the strength to act alone. 'We need the Americans. We need the Americans militarily, but especially also to keep up the sanctions pressure, because the worst thing that could happen now is that the US says 'let's get off the sanctions' and starts engaging with Russia economically, because that would be exactly the wrong cause of action now,' she said. Diplomats admit that the speed with which Trump is moving in comparison with deliberative Europe is a problem. Quite how a coalition of the willing – led by one leader long committed to Europe's autonomy and another committed to the primacy of the Atlantic alliance - can develop is unclear. The addition to the coalition leadership of an incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, means the trajectory is moving slowly towards a European preparedness to try to help Ukraine survive without the US. Germany has a leading role in providing air defence systems to Ukraine and Merz's remarks so far suggest he wants to take a more robust stance than his SDP predecessor, Olaf Scholz. If so it is possible the advocates of engagement with Trump are losing the internal arguments as the decisions and insults pile up. Some of this is human emotion and the hand of history. The New Zealand high commissioner, Phil Goff, recalls Winston Churchill famously denouncing Neville Chamberlain, saying: 'You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.' Goff then added: 'Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, but do you think he really understands history?' Or take the anger of the Lithuanian politician Vytautas Landsbergis at the treatment of Zelenskyy: 'They called the guest in, beat him up, spat on him, and threw him out the door.' What would he have done? 'I would have listened silently to everything they said and said one word at the end: liars.' But it is also the accumulation of decisions being taken by Trump towards Russia, including the end of cyber operations against Russia, and other steps to make the lives of Russian oligarchs easier. It has led both London and Paris to conclude it is now very unlikely the US will provide a military backstop. Starmer and Europe then have to decide if they have the resources to help save Ukraine without US help. Much of what the EU will discuss at its summit on Thursday will help with Europe's defence in four year's time, but what matters is what help can be provided to Ukraine in four months when US supplies and spares run out. The threat to seize Russian state bank assets either now or if Russia breaches the terms of a ceasefire remains one of the few cards Europe can play without Trump, and by offering a ceasefire himself, Zelenskyy has also tried to kill the Trump claim that he wants endless war. But Starmer's hope that Trump if not reliable was biddable seems to be dying.
