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

The poet’s debut novel is a transcendent portrait of gay desire that pays homage to the English literary tradition

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.