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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.
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mining of authors' work is nothing new – AI is just doing what creative humans do
Authors say they are angry that Meta has used their material to train its artificial intelligence (Authors call for UK government to hold Meta accountable for copyright infringement, 31 March). But hasn't that been going on for thousands of years? Isn't all human thought an iteration of what has gone before? Artists and scientists have been mining the work of others for generations; that's how human thought evolves. Ian McEwan was influenced by LP Hartley's The Go-Between. George Orwell's Nighteen Eighty-Four was inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Did Richard Osman invent the genre of cosy crime? The publishing industry as a whole is guilty of putting out bandwagon books, which ape the style, themes and tropes of a hit. The chief executive of the Society of Authors, Anna Ganley, says writers are 'up in arms'. Did she coin that phrase? Creativity has always 'trained' on the work of VincentWestmancote, Worcestershire Do you have a photograph you'd like to share with Guardian readers? If so, please click here to upload it. A selection will be published in our Readers' best photographs galleries and in the print edition on Saturdays.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Anthony Horowitz: ‘I'm too nervous to reread The Lord of the Rings – it might reveal how jaded I've become'
My earliest reading memory I started with a comic: Valiant. Hardly great literature – but it provided escapism from my prep school. The tales of Kelly's Eye and the Steel Claw enthralled me and I still dream of them now. My favourite book growing up I was always a fan of Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise. She was a sort of female James Bond, a criminal turned government agent. My parents used to read each new book as it came out and then hand it on to me. It was one of the few things that brought us together as a family. The book that changed me as a teenager LP Hartley's The Go-Between was my doorway from light fiction – thrillers and adventure stories – to serious literature. It's such a sad book that it made me question my own sense of melancholy as a teenager and prompted me to take more control of my life. I didn't want to end up like Leo Colston, its terribly damaged narrator. The book that changed my mind I'd always had a mistrust of short stories, even though I've written many myself. They often struck me as insubstantial, unsatisfying. Then, about eight years ago, I read The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon, a collection of nine stories, each one outstanding and truly memorable. The book that made me want to be a writer I was 10 years old when I knew I wanted to be a writer, but when I was given The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, aged 17, I realised that I would be a crime writer. I was living in a quite dull suburb, but Doyle showed me that the tentacles of mystery, intrigue and murder are far-reaching and embrace every walk of life. The book I came back to I was given Hard Times at school and it put me off Dickens for about 10 years. But then, staying in Istanbul, the father of my best friend more or less forced me to read Great Expectations and I've loved Dickens ever since. The book I reread I have reread most Dickens novels twice or three times, usually about 20 years apart. The joy of great literature is that each time you come back to a book, you find something different to enjoy and this teaches you something new about yourself. The book I could never read again There are a lot of books I'm nervous of rereading because I enjoyed them so intensely I worry I'll realise how jaded I've become. The Once and Future King by TH White is one such book. And, despite the brilliance of Peter Jackson's films, The Lord of the Rings is certainly another. The book I discovered later in life I've only recently started reading serious poetry, and discovered Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings in my 50s. Days and An Arundel Tomb are two of my favourite poems and now I try to read poetry every morning. I'm afraid it's a better start to the day than the news. The book I am currently reading I'm immersed in The Nazi Mind by Laurence Rees – who is the leading authority on the rise of nazism and the Holocaust. This book looks at the psychology and the methodology of the Third Reich and, although he is careful to make no direct comparisons, it sheds horrible light on the way the world, particularly the USA, is heading now. Read it and be afraid. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My comfort read I have found myself retreating more and more to the 19th century: Jane Austen, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, etc. Not all these stories are happy but there's a sense that things happen as they should. I'm not sure that's true of how we live now. Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz is published by Century. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Is Zinc Additive Really Needed For Older Engines?
"The past," said English novelist L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, "is a foreign country; they do things differently there." As far as book openings go, it's pretty solid. Right up there with, "The sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" or "The Man in Black fled across the desert, and The Gunslinger followed" in the pantheon of all-timer opening sentences. It's also a pretty fair assessment of early to mid-20th century automotive technologies. From Babbitt bearings and drum brakes to carburetors and leaded gasoline, the old ways often seem strange and foreign to today's car nerds. One very important automotive technology that's changed dramatically over the years — although you might not think about it as "technology" the same as you would braking or suspension or engine management systems — is motor oil. In the past, motor oil had, as Derek Bieri likes to say, "All the vitamins and minerals old engines need." Over the years, however, engines and emissions standards changed and motor oils changed with them. Nowadays, motor oils — both synthetic and organic, as it were — are optimized for use in brand new engines stuffed with bleeding edge technologies and tolerances measured in Plancks. What about older engines, though? What about our beloved Buick Nailheads and Chevy Small Blocks and Chrysler 440s? Do modern oils have enough of those good old vitamins and minerals to run safely in the engines that powered our fathers' Oldsmobiles? Read more: What's The Stereotypical Old Person's New Car? Honestly? Yeah, for the most part. Modern oils, especially synthetics, are way better at keeping your engine safe and running at peak performance than the dinosaur squeezins your granddad used. The one area where today's engine oils might be considered lacking is when it comes to the amount of zinc in the oil, and even then, it's kind of an edge case that really only matters if you have a flat tappet cam. See, back in the day, most engines had flat tappets to operate their valves and soft, cast-iron camshafts to go with them. Despite the fact that both flat tappets and roller tappets (and their attendant camshafts) had been around forever, the latter was the go-to for mass produced vehicles. That's because flat tappet cams were cheaper, easier to produce, and tended to last the life of the car — remember, cars didn't last as long in the old days. Only high-po one-offs and race cars had fancy pants roller cams. In the '80s, though, as technology advanced, economy standards tightened, and horsepower demands increased, roller tappet cams became more common. If you have an older vehicle with an engine that has a flat tappet cam in it, you should be using a zinc additive. How old, you ask? Well, if you're rocking a V6 or V8 made before the mid-1980s, you're probably going to want to throw some zinc additive into your crankcase every oil change. In the pre-roller tappet cam days, motor oils had more zinc in them. Zinc is slippery, and forms a very thin, sacrificial barrier between soft internal engine parts. The soft, cast iron camshafts used with flat tappets needed this sacrificial layer of zinc to prevent excess wear. With the rise of both roller tappets and catalytic converters, however, zinc became less of a thing in oils because roller tappet cams are made of harder materials and zinc has a bad habit of clogging up cats if it gets into the engine's combustion chambers. That's kind of a TL;DR explanation of the technical aspects of it, but you get the idea. You can pick up Zinc additives just about anywhere auto parts are sold, and it's not that expensive. If you're not doing your own oil changes (why aren't you doing your own oil changes?), your mechanic should definitely be able to get some zinc additive for you. Look at it like insurance — would you prefer to spend your money on a $15 bottle of zinc additive every few thousand miles, or an expensive, time-consuming, and possibly engine-out top end rebuild after you flatspot your cam doing burnouts? Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
