Contemporary literature

Sean Hewitt’s Open Heaven explores adolescent desire through the memory of a fascination that never quite becomes a love story. It opens with James returning to his village to visit the farm where Luke once lived. From there, the narrative looks back to James at sixteen, captivated by a handsome boy staying with his uncle amid difficult family circumstances, including his father’s imprisonment.

The novel’s most appealing quality is its modest narrative scope. This is not a grand romance that changes the protagonist’s life forever, but an exploration of attraction, anticipation and imagined possibilities. Very little needs to happen: the fascination itself supplies the story. That restraint feels appropriate to adolescence, when someone barely known can occupy an extraordinary amount of emotional space.

Yet the writing does not always make the most of this premise. At times, the novel reads more like an account of what happened than a fully realised imaginative experience. The emphasis falls on recounting events, while passages that might have benefited from greater depth or stylistic development feel underworked. For a story so dependent on the texture of private feeling, these stretches are particularly noticeable.

There are also inconsistencies in the portrayal of James’s isolation. His insistence that he has no meaningful relationships at school and no one to talk to sits awkwardly beside scenes suggesting that girls surround him and confide their secrets to him. Having company does not, of course, preclude loneliness. Nevertheless, the novel could do more to clarify the distance between his social circumstances and his sense of being alone.

I also wonder whether some of the book’s commercial appeal reflects an appetite for stories that remain insufficiently represented: intimate accounts of friendship, longing and imagined romance between teenage boys. That appetite is understandable, but the significance of the subject does not, by itself, make the novel an enduring literary achievement. I am unconvinced that Open Heaven will still command much attention in twenty years.

For all these reservations, it is a pleasant summer read—easy to imagine enjoying on a beach—and I am glad to have read it. It is not, however, a masterpiece. Hewitt shows considerable potential, but here that promise feels only partly fulfilled. I would be interested to see him develop it into a more accomplished and lasting work.