Young love: we’ve all known its roiling agonies and shimmering ecstasies. Our pop songs brim with it, suffusing our adult lives with the perfumes of nostalgia, yet for the most part – at least in the English-speaking world – our grown-up art forms tend to neglect adolescent desire altogether. If we’re lucky, we might encounter Romeo and Juliet during our schooldays, but it’s a dose of rapture that has to last us a lifetime.
It’s a curious aversion, and as a jobbing academic specialising in literary practice, it’s one that Seán Hewitt is surely aware of. But Hewitt is a practising poet too, and one whose work is notable for its lush sensuality. In Open, Heaven, his first novel, he has produced a kind of origin story for just such a talent – a portrait of the sensualist as a young man.
As if to give himself licence, Hewitt first frames his narrative in recognisably adult terms. James Legh (‘pronounced Lee’) is in his mid-30s and emerging from the wreck of a marriage. It is not the break-up itself that provokes his crisis but the accusation that incited it: his husband had realised, James writes, “that I could love him but not desire him”. It is a charge that undoes him, and not just because he knows it’s true. No, James’s problem is that he knows why it’s true. Prompted by an estate agent’s listing, he undertakes a kind of pilgrimage. Returning to the village where he grew up, it begins to dawn on James that he never really did.
“Time runs faster backwards,” he reflects, but the birthplace to which he returns is one that seems stilled in amber. Thornmere nestles in some unspecified northern dale, an idyll “fragrant with buddleia and with elderflower”, and a place “that time had visited just once, in the early nineteenth century”. Thornmere, in other words, is the Eden from which James was banished, and if he cannot regain paradise, he can at least try to understand the nature of the fall.
Retracing his steps, he recalls the first intimations of trouble. James’s is a family of modest means, and the shy, bookish 16-year-old is cajoled into taking a job on a milk round. It was, he says, “just another indignity on the road to adulthood”, but it proves to be an indignity worth suffering. As he endures the milkman’s boorish talk, the realisation crystallises that “I wasn’t a man like he was a man”, but he hasn’t yet discerned the precise shape of his desire. Then he encounters Luke.
The nephew of a local farmer, Luke is a year older. Blond, athletic and rakishly lovely, he has a reputation for being “no end of trouble”. Needless to say, the warning does little to dent his appeal. James is entirely smitten, and he is sufficiently galvanised to come out to his parents. The moment is predictably excruciating – his mother weeps while his father remains silent – and Hewitt’s handling of it is subtly devastating. “In the quiet idyll of the village,” James notes mournfully, “I was the rupture, the punctum in the landscape”.
Word gets around, too, as it does in all small communities. Never on easy terms with his schoolmates, James now finds himself blundering from no man’s land – he discovers that he is newly fascinating to girls – to straightforwardly hostile territory, as the boys enact the brutish, backs-to-the-wall rituals of tribal affirmation. Even those encounters, though, are fraught with complications: Hewitt is a keen-eyed observer of schoolyard orthodoxy, noting how “their crudeness [and] their violence dissipated when they were alone”.
For James, all of this might be bearable if he had a boyfriend to show for it, but in spite of his shy best efforts, Luke remains elusive and mercurial. They do see each other sporadically, and at times their encounters seem to shimmer with possibility. Luke is an outcast too, after a fashion, and haltingly takes James into his confidence: he yearns to be reunited with his father, who may or may not be in prison. He has a venturesome nature, and at times their sylvan escapades – one richly suggestive scene involves a cave and a penknife – seem forever on the point of shading into intimacy.
In the end, though, it makes little difference whether Luke can love James in return. The rapture has been set in train, and it will leave James forever transfigured. Indeed, it is the totalising force of youthful infatuation that forms Hewitt’s true subject, and it has rarely been documented with such fidelity and tenderness.
Towards the end of the book, as the boys share a tent, James inwardly rehearses all he might say. “I would be whoever he wanted…wear whatever mask he gave me.” The moment passes, but the transformation in him is already underway. Love has touched him, even if Luke has not, and love is always “the dream and the real thing in one”.
