Gorgeous

Open, Heaven
Seán Hewitt

I adored this book. It was so beautifully written that, by the time I got to the end, I had a long list of phrases I wanted to quote in this account – more than I can possibly include. The novel is narrated by a man, James, who finds himself returning to the village where he grew up ‘hoping to find the answer to something unfinished, some thread of my life that was unravelling’. The ‘something unfinished’ turns out to be his teenage infatuation and ambiguous relationship with a boy, Luke; James tells us that ‘I had never let go of him. He had transcended himself in my life, and had become the pattern of all my subsequent longings’.    

The novel brilliantly captures the intensity of first desire, its ambivalences and ambiguities. James tells us that ‘I couldn’t take the proximity, the mixture of hope and desperation that coursed through me and then would pass’. He spends much time analysing his time with Luke, agonizing over meanings and fantasizing about what could be to the point where, he admits, ‘there was no distinction between my daydream and reality’. Uncertainty saturates his narration in a way I found both moving and compelling.      

Moreover, Open, Heaven portrays a time at which ‘adulthood was burning through me’. The tension between James’s adolescent desire to break away from his parents and his ongoing attachment to his family is subtly depicted. I was particularly struck by the picture the novel paints of coming out in a small rural community, and the way in which that further complicates James’s relationship with his parents. James notes a sadness in his mother and tells us ‘I thought I knew where that grief had come from. I thought it was because I had cheated her out of her grandchildren, a wedding, a whole imagined life, and I felt in a way like I had bereaved her not only of a son, but of her own dream too’. Those ‘I thought’s are key. James is sensitive and his analyses acute, but there is always the sense, in his narration, that he could be utterly wrong. The result is a story that is gently, wonderfully heart-breaking and one of my favourite novels this year.