Open, Heaven
by Seán Hewitt
Hewitt’s debut novel Open, Heaven 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.
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.
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. 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. Sarah Perry
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