In Open, Heaven, poet Seán Hewitt crafts a novel of exquisite tenderness and devastating precision, chronicling the awakening desires of sixteen-year-old James in the confined spaces of rural England. Set against the backdrop of a village called Thornmere in 2002, this debut fiction work maintains the same lyrical intensity that distinguished Hewitt’s acclaimed poetry collection Tongues of Fire and his memoir All Down Darkness Wide.
The novel opens with James as an adult, returning to Thornmere after twenty years, drawn back by the lingering pull of a teenage love that defined—and perhaps stunted—his emotional development. What follows is a delicate excavation of memory, desire, and the brutal beauty of adolescent longing.
Narrative Architecture: Past and Present Intertwined
Hewitt constructs his narrative with architectural precision, opening with a prologue set in 2022 that frames the central story. James, now in his mid-thirties with a failed marriage behind him, returns to Thornmere compelled by an unresolved yearning:
“I had given up so much to be close to him, and there were things, people, I could not recover. I think that, in the light of him, my mind and my body were remade, were cast sometime that year, and now they bore his imprint, the shape of his hand.”
This elegant framing device establishes the novel’s central tension—how a formative love continues to haunt decades later—before plunging us back to 2002, when sixteen-year-old James first encounters Luke at a local farm.
Atmosphere as Character
The atmosphere of Open, Heaven becomes almost another character entirely. The novel is deeply attuned to the natural world, with descriptions that transform mundane rural landscapes into charged emotional territories. When James first sees Luke smoking behind a shed, the world around them seems to bend toward their inevitable connection. Hewitt writes:
“He closed his eyes against the sun, his blonde lashes soft and curled, and lifted his cigarette again to his lips, which felt almost like a provocation, the silence had gone on so long.”
This attention to sensory detail—the quality of light, the texture of leaves, the dampness of air—creates a world that feels simultaneously ordinary and enchanted. Thornmere becomes not just a setting but a condition of existence, a place that both shelters and suffocates its inhabitants.
Character: Vulnerability and Violence
The characterization of Luke represents one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Unlike many coming-of-age novels that rely on archetypes, Luke emerges as a fully realized character with his own internal struggles. The son of an imprisoned father and an absent mother, he carries a burden of abandonment that manifests in flashes of volatility and vulnerability. His search for his father—a recurring motif—provides emotional ballast to what might otherwise be a more conventional story of unrequited desire.
James, our narrator, navigates his sexuality with a mix of longing and shame that feels painfully authentic. His emotional journey is complicated by his responsibilities to his younger brother Eddie, whose epilepsy creates another layer of family tension. The contrast between James’s inner life—rich with fantasy and anticipation—and his outward performance of normality creates a compelling narrative tension.
Prose That Breathes
What distinguishes Open, Heaven most significantly is Hewitt’s prose. As a poet, he brings extraordinary precision to his sentences without sacrificing emotional impact. Consider this passage describing James’s feelings when he finally spends a night in a tent with Luke:
“What I wanted to say was touch me, just lay your hand against my thigh, lean your face into the skin of my neck, let me feel your breath against me. I wanted to say that I would be whoever he wanted, that I would wear whatever mask he gave me, that I would be someone else for him, and that I would tell no one, that I didn’t mind giving myself up if it meant he would take me…”
This interior monologue captures the essence of adolescent desire—its intensity, its willingness to self-abnegate, its desperate hunger for connection. The novel is filled with such moments of startling emotional clarity.
Critique: Pacing and Peripheral Characters
Despite its considerable strengths, Open, Heaven occasionally suffers from uneven pacing. The middle section, particularly when James is confined to his home after running away with Luke, feels somewhat static compared to the vivid energy of their earlier encounters.
Additionally, while the central relationship between James and Luke is rendered with extraordinary depth, some peripheral characters—particularly James’s parents—occasionally lack the same dimensionality. The novel hints at their inner lives without fully developing them, creating a slight imbalance in the narrative’s emotional architecture.
The epileptic younger brother Eddie serves as an effective counterpoint to James’s self-absorption, but his character sometimes feels more like a plot device than a fully realized person. His seizures occur at narratively convenient moments, creating a pattern that occasionally feels mechanical rather than organic.
Thematic Richness: Identity, Belonging, and First Love
Open, Heaven explores several interconnected themes with sensitivity and nuance:
- The Geography of Desire: Hewitt maps desire onto physical spaces—the hollow in the woods, the barn, the tent—creating a landscape of longing that mirrors James’s emotional journey.
- The Different Faces of Love: The novel distinguishes between various forms of love—familial, fraternal, romantic, sexual—while showing how they sometimes conflict and sometimes complement each other.
- The Construction of Identity: James’s understanding of his sexuality develops in parallel with his understanding of his place within his family and community, creating a complex portrait of identity formation.
- The Persistence of Memory: The novel’s framing device emphasizes how formative experiences continue to shape us long after they’ve ended, raising questions about whether we ever truly move on from our most intense emotional experiences.
Comparison to Contemporary Works
Readers familiar with Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You or Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain will recognize similar themes in Hewitt’s work—the excavation of queer desire, the complexity of family bonds, the specificity of place. Yet Hewitt brings his own distinctive sensibility to these themes, combining the economy of poetry with the emotional expansiveness of fiction.
Unlike many contemporary coming-of-age novels that rely heavily on external conflict, Open, Heaven locates its drama primarily in the interior lives of its characters. The result is a novel that feels both timeless and distinctly contemporary—a story about the universal experience of first love told through the specific lens of queer desire in early 2000s rural England.
Final Assessment: A Luminous Debut
Open, Heaven announces Seán Hewitt as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts. The novel transforms the familiar territory of adolescent awakening into something fresh and vital through the precision of its language and the authenticity of its emotional landscape.
What lingers long after the final page is the novel’s honesty about the messiness of desire—how it can simultaneously elevate and devastate us, how it can make us both more and less ourselves. In James’s voice, Hewitt has created a narrator of disarming vulnerability whose experiences of love, loss, and longing will resonate with readers regardless of their own sexual orientations or backgrounds.
If the novel occasionally falters in its pacing or in the development of secondary characters, these are minor flaws in an otherwise luminous debut. Hewitt has accomplished something rare: a novel about first love that avoids both sentimentality and cynicism, finding instead a middle path of clear-eyed compassion for the magnificent confusion of growing up and discovering who you are—and who you might become.
Open, Heaven reminds us that some loves, however brief or unrequited, mark us forever—not as wounds to be healed but as essential parts of ourselves to be carried forward into whatever life awaits us.