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Ep. 5. Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven
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In this episode, we read the opening of Seán Hewitt's Open, Heaven (2025). Buy the novel from a local independent bookshop, or via Bookshop.org.
Seán Hewitt’s debut poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. All Down Darkness Wide, his memoir, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and he has collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. His second collection of poetry is Rapture’s Road. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Open, Heaven (2025) is his first novel.
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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close to the Podcast. I'm Chris Lloyd, a writer and academic, and on this show I talk to other writers about their work and their practice. We also collaborate on a close reading of their writing, looking at a particular passage or a whole poem, and talk about its meanings, resonances and the technicalities of language.
00:00:21
Speaker
This is a show for book nerds, aspiring and established authors or anyone interested in how texts get made. In this episode
Interview with Sean Hewitt
00:00:30
Speaker
I talk to Sean Hewitt about his novel Open Heaven. Sean is the author of six books including the poetry collections Tongues of Fire and Rapture's Road and the memoir All Down Darkness Wide. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
00:00:51
Speaker
Open Heaven is his first novel. Welcome Sean, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. ah So the kind of opening question is, what are your thoughts or feelings about close reading as an activity? Like I know you obviously teach literature too, so this is something you're familiar with. And how do you feel about close reading your own work? So I don't think I've ever close read my own work or been in the presence of people close reading my own work, not in the kind of intense way that I think that we might be doing today.
00:01:19
Speaker
and In terms of close reading myself, I i love it. um But mainly because I think it kind of extends the the bounds of ah a text that you're you're looking at, either temporarily, you know, like if you're reading a poem to talk about something for an hour or longer.
00:01:36
Speaker
I think is really valuable and I do that with my students all the time because I think that you can go a long way with just close reading and I think that the more I try and get my students to understand that the better their work is like you don't have to necessarily extrapolate everything you can just kind of stick on a paragraph and that might be good too so close reading thumbs up from me close reading of my own work maybe close to psychoanalysis but we will see
00:02:05
Speaker
It's always therapy. How do your students find
The Practice of Close Reading
00:02:07
Speaker
that when you say, because I'm doing the same thing most of my time, is like, no, let's look at the sentence in front of us. Like, yeah are they usually responsive to that or or is the inclination to contextualize or extrapolate something bigger?
00:02:20
Speaker
I think the inclination is sometimes to to bring a lot of themselves to a sentence and I try to get them to focus just on the sentence itself and it takes a while for them to kind of understand that I'm not necessarily asking for that kind of speculation.
00:02:39
Speaker
um about you know I think this symbolizes x because where is the evidence for that I think then they kind of get thrown on the on the rigor of of close reading and sometimes they fall into a complete silence when I ask them you know what about this comma but I tend to let them sit in silence for a little bit until someone talks and then eventually I think they get the hang of of how to to do it because it's quite a strange activity But I think it's really important to for students to remember that like a text is not just there, out of the blue, out of nowhere, that it is a source of lots of decisions and that it's an artificial thing. And sometimes I have to kind of tell them you know it's not real. Just remember that this is not like a real thing that's been made. So why has it been made like that? And eventually, I think that's that's useful.
00:03:30
Speaker
but Well, I definitely want to ask you about commerce and punctuation and yeah the idea of a like a made thing. Hopefully we can see into some of that process with you. A broader question
Writing Journey and Transition
00:03:42
Speaker
though, like how, this is your first novel. How did this come about? Like you've obviously written many genres at this point now in poetry, in nonfiction memoir, in the retellings of the Greek stories. Like, did you always want to write a novel? Was there something that just emerged?
00:03:58
Speaker
I think I always wanted to write a novel, but I told myself it wasn't possible for me to write a novel. So I think when I wrote the memoir, I knew that I could write kind of creative prose. And the strange thing with the novel is not only is it kind of just a different piece in terms of how it's written, but there is a constant sense that you're making it up as you go along. And I think that requires a different sort of test of nerve than memoir or poetry that's coming from life, because You know, one day you'll be sat at a desk and you'll be like, you know, my character has a dog. What's the dog's name? And you're just kind of making stuff up and it feels a bit stupid for a while. But after a time, it becomes very real. And then you're like, of course, the character's dog's name is Banjo or whatever.
00:04:45
Speaker
So it came about, when did I start writing it? 2022, I think, maybe the same year that the memoir came out. And I think I often write to distract myself from having a book out. um so ah So that's where that came from.
00:05:01
Speaker
I love that. Just like, let's just write something else so I don't need to think about this other thing entering the world. So we're going to do a
Themes in 'Open Heaven'
00:05:07
Speaker
close shooting of the very opening of the novel. Can you tell us a little bit about just the book generally for those, you know, we're recording this a bit earlier, but it's coming out as the book is entering the world. Is this, is this stuff we want to know or that listeners need to know before we start getting into this passage?
00:05:23
Speaker
it is a book mostly set over four seasons in one year so it's in four parts beginning with the autumn ending in the summer and in my head is a sort of love story but it's not really a love story as well because the love is or the desire is all on one side it's kind of an unrequited love story and my challenge to myself is to try and make a an unrequited love story that was nevertheless not credibly bleak or or depressing like I wanted it to feel kind of romantic at the same time as it being not a romance but it kind of came from conversations after a while I had this kind of thesis that for a lot of queer men their first kind of formative experience of love was an unrequited love
00:06:12
Speaker
and I was had it in my head like what would that what does that do to people's brains or what does it do to the way that they experience desire ah to kind of have that archetypal at first experience which is usually a kind of the worst or headiest experience being one that throws you entirely into yourself. So I put the whole novel is in the characters in the main character's mind because I wanted to kind of think about what love it does to the imagination, whether good or bad. But I guess for this passage, the the story is also framed ah with a later narrative, which only occurs twice in the book. But this is set in 2022, looking back and kind of revisiting this story after the narrator's marriage has kind of fallen apart.
00:07:03
Speaker
So we begin with this kind of older narrator who's going to be in his late 30s, looking back at his 16 year old self. Great. Would you be able to read that passage for us then, please? Okay.
Reading from 'Open Heaven'
00:07:19
Speaker
Time runs faster backwards. The years, long arduous and uncertain when taken one by one, unspool quickly, turning liquid. So one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind, is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow encrusted garden.
00:07:46
Speaker
And then the garden sends its snow upwards into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves and blooms again in reverse. The faces smile at me back there at the far end of the real. They are younger, more innocent, lighter.
00:08:05
Speaker
If, now that I am in my adulthood, time seems like a silted riverbed I cannot wade through. I find more often than before that I can spin it backwards, can turn it into a flow of waters, warmer, sweeter, washing the years away, carrying me with them.
00:08:23
Speaker
And if one day, perhaps sitting at my desk puzzling over a photograph or some snatch of memory, I start to float down that river. I might go past the meadows in season, hear laughter coming like a clear bell from somewhere, someone, or maybe a sharp voice raised against me. There are intervals of light and dark overhead, like the sun breaking through willows. And it always brings me back here, one year when I am 16 years old.
00:08:52
Speaker
And I see in this dream, or this imagined reversal, a family standing there, and sometimes on the other bank of the river, a lone boy who might nod to me in recognition, or who might just as easily turn his back and walk across the fields into the sunrise, and into the morning, and be gone.
00:09:13
Speaker
Thank you so much. I think it always helps to hear you read it rather than me read it. but And it's interesting to hear you read that. I've heard you read your poems numerous times and you read your poems quite slowly, I think, in a way that like really makes you hear like every little bit of cadence. And I think you hear some of that there in these sentences. So I want to get into the sentences. Was there always a frame kind of part to the novel?
00:09:36
Speaker
No, no, there wasn't always a frame. I think it came maybe about a third of the way through the book. Like I had started, I knew it was gonna be in seasons, but I was starting with autumn. And then I was actually in America, I was in Rhode Island. have And I went to a cafe and they the kind of idea for the frame just came to me. And and I think I wrote most of this kind of opening prologue um over a day or so when I was there.
00:10:05
Speaker
And so I kind of had to invent a new character for this prologue, um one that you wouldn't really meet again, which was the adult version of ah the main character. So yeah, no, this was not the opening originally.
00:10:21
Speaker
interesting because I when I read it I was interested by that frame and what the kind of the immersion as you were talking about earlier right kind of been thrown into the consciousness that suddenly we've got this split right of like both the consciousness itself at the time and then this detachment like it made me think a bit of Giovanni's room things like that you know the way they where you have this Like we know something's going to go wrong. Like we know it's going to end badly kind of from that very opening. So like there's really no surprise in that regard. There's like, right there's no tension in that kind of engine so that you've got something else at play.
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think and one thing I wanted to do is by framing the narrator at the start, kind of draw your attention to what I was talking about before, which is that this is artificial or constructed and that you are not necessarily to trust this narrator who is kind of looking back through time, but choosing as a writer does what you're shown, how you see it, that they have this detachment from the ongoing event.
00:11:25
Speaker
And that, you know, I always think of the opening of a book to me, whether it's a book of poetry ah or a novel or a memoir, as as kind of, I don't know anything about music, but, um you know, like at the beginning of a symphony, that like you have kind of all the material is built in that kind of sets what the motifs of the music might do or the tone of the music, and you kind of get it all in, you know, like the first kind of the overture to an opera or something.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I think that, like, for me, the opening of the book should do that, which I think is where I became dissatisfied with just beginning in autumn with the 16-year-old James. And instead, I wanted to kind of give you the frame of of themes and constructedness and and maybe so a seed of darkness, but also nostalgia through through the opening of of the book.
00:12:20
Speaker
Thank you for saying that. Cause I say this in every single class that I teach. I'm like the first page
Setting the Tone in a Novel
00:12:24
Speaker
of every book will tell you everything you need to know about what follows. We all always just do that. If activities are not going where I want them to go. It's like, right. Let's just go to the first page. It will tell us everything. And that first line, right? Time runs faster backwards.
00:12:37
Speaker
Like we assume we're in the world of temporality, of time, of memory, but also something skewed there, right? Like that it's running backwards, maybe not what we'd be expecting in terms of how time is running, right? So we're already on a kind of odd footing. Yeah, I think it is an odd footing. And I think to me that opening line suggests the sort of ease of nostalgia, which kind of runs through the book, which is maybe something to be questioned as you as you read. But also, I think that there are kind of moments in our life when we're set spinning backwards over something. That's how memory kind of works. like It fires us backwards. And I think one of the difficult things about being a person is ah what I was trying to get at here is you know we you have to live in time.
00:13:28
Speaker
you're going forwards all the time, but you don't really have the the you know the mental ability to process the ongoingness of time as it happens to you. You can only really reflect backwards and so you're kind of forced to live forwards.
00:13:46
Speaker
but but most of the time you're you're building on on what came before. So it is much more difficult to live going forwards than it is to kind of live in reflection. So the the opening of the book is kind of pulling at this moment in which the narrator has stumbled in life and things have fallen apart and naturally he kind of goes looking for the root cause of this. Whether you think he finds it or not is is another thing but he's certainly on a sort of mystery hunt for his own mind. So I wanted to set the up this opening chapter as kind of you know this
00:14:27
Speaker
relatively strange adult narrator coming to revisit an empty house and populate it with a memory that is either troubling him or in which he is the troublemaker. Yeah.
00:14:44
Speaker
will come to this, but there's also like speculation in this opening, that like speculated memories and speculat so there's like, there's even more distance built in, which I want to get to, but that second sentence, the years, M dash, long, arduous and uncertain when taken one by one, like an M dash already. I don't know how your editor felt about this, but that parenthesis, like we're already stretching things out, right? At the level of the grammar. Did anyone comment on, are we really doing M dashes straight away, Sean?
00:15:12
Speaker
no one No one would dare. ah actually I was in Slovakia last year. with ah the translator of of my memoir, Michal Talo, and I brought him a proof of open heaven. And I said, you know, I think it would be easier to translate than the memoir for for various reasons. And he said, oh, good, you know, he was looking forward to that. And he said, you know, he got to the second sentence and it was like, no, you want to sentence, no, this is not an easy sentence to translate. Because I think it's kind of a non-spooling of clauses that keeps on going.
00:15:49
Speaker
And I guess in some ways that will be a test of your attention right at the start. You know, this is not a novel that opens with, you know, a kind of snappy, quick narrator. This is going to be a somewhat languorous narrator. Yeah, and you use that word unspool and quickly, which is funny because it's like the opposite of quick, right? This novel is is is not that at all. And then we move into kind of liquidity and then this run of like sibilance right like so summer shimmering soon appears subsumed blackness right like it runs really softly through that so that we're in a kind of gentle kind of maybe wistfulness of like the past that then quickly turns to me anyway to the hard f's that flashes a face fireside how much of this is conscious i guess because some listeners might be into this world of right picking apart sound and stuff but others might not be like how much of that are you thinking about as you're writing the sentence
00:16:48
Speaker
I think thinking is probably the wrong way of putting it, but hearing, you know, if you can separate them, I'm definitely conscious of the hearing of it because I will always, you know, I couldn't even tell you how many times I reread something that I've written. It's my way of drafting it to myself. And I think in the rereading it aloud,
00:17:09
Speaker
I end up switching words to the one that sounds right. So, yeah, I hear that, you know, maybe I wouldn't have kind of consciously thought flashes face fireside, that, you know, I have to have the Fs, but it probably just sounds right to me. And I think as well, like, relapse of blackness flashes, like all the A's there and face, there's probably just something kind of sonorous about about the AIDS there that makes me happy. Do you think you're more conscious of that given your kind of roots in poetry?
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, maybe. Probably. But I don't know. I think even I think when I'm writing academic writing, I read my sentence back to myself and I'm like, does it sound good? And if it doesn't, I'm kind of unsatisfied with it. um
Sound and Style in Writing
00:18:03
Speaker
And I think maybe I'm just a person for who sound is kind of primary, which is a shame because people don't tend to read novels aloud. so know other than in classrooms I guess when let's just read it together. That next line and then the garden sends its snow upwards and we've got the sky and the leaves like suddenly we're in this at least the non-human natural world if not a pastoral one which I guess readers of you would recognize right as a kind of common theme is the natural world like well I know the natural world is central to this book but will you like I need that to be there quite early
00:18:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think in some ways, because I already knew where the book was going when I wrote this, I wanted to rewind you through the book. So you would almost get, you know, like if you had a ah video for old people, you know, you press rewind and you get that like through the whole film before you get back to the start and you get like flashes of stuff as it goes.
00:19:01
Speaker
I kind of wanted us to run backwards through perhaps like resonant images that might appear later in the book. I think if I were like hugely presumptuous that people might reread the prologue after they've finished the book, the prologue will reveal more of itself to them. And there are kind of images that flow through the prologue that will then kind of turn up in the in the novel itself. But yeah, the natural world is really important because it's set through seasons, so um I wanted it to feel like a... i pitched I pitched to my agent as like Edmund White meets Thomas Hardy or something like that, like I was going for a kind of blend of the English pastoral with queer literature. So yeah, yeah, I can't escape it. I mean we've talked about Thomas Hardy before, I'm not going to turn this into Thomas Hardy podcast, but yeah, the kind of sense of
00:19:57
Speaker
chance meetings, people overlapping, bumping into the wrong person at the wrong time on the wrong corner of a street. Like that is hardy territory, right? It's like, oh no, that person's there at the bridge when you did want them to be. Yeah. And also the kind of the way in which small things that we do might have outsized effects on other people, I think is very hardy. You know, like the bit in Return of the Native, I think I can't remember the names of the characters. one of them just kind of mentions something to one of the characters' mothers that sends her out onto the moor where she dies and it's just kind of a passing comment and then she feels terrible about it for ages. But that idea that kind of a small twist of something might just unravel and there you have like the unraveling and the unspooling. so you know think
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And then, grammatically, you do some more unraveling. My
The Role of Punctuation in Narrative
00:20:50
Speaker
note on the Google Doc is let's talk commas. The faces smile at me, comma, back there, comma, at the far end of the real semicolon. They are younger, comma, more innocent, comma, like, you're really slowing us down, right? Like, that's the intent, I think, of those commas. Like, you could, with those sub clauses, take those commas out, and it would still make sense, I think. But there's a real slowing And then in the next sentence too, like if comment now that I'm in my adulthood, even that like if break, like it, you are slowing or forcing us to slow down. And I think that's one of the lessons I often try and teach is that like the book is demanding you read it at its pace, not at the pace you want to read. Yeah and also I think you kind of need commas to parcel out a long sentence because otherwise you'll get lost in it and I don't want people to be lost like I think that the comma is there to help you read the sentence to get you through it and and to kind of throw the emphasis in the right place as you go
00:21:46
Speaker
i mean i think i was telling you before that i'd not to use like some version of this because i'd changed like 300 commas between the proof and the and the final version and sometimes i think that's just me throwing my emphasis in a certain place on a certain day you know i think if i read this book again i would change the commas again and but you can never really be done with commas right no you know like if you if I teach like Cormac McCarthy or something, if you read McCarthy, like he's like, I don't want comments. Like there's maybe one and in a long sentence, right? He's just using the and. Like it's a very deliberate, it has an effect on the reading process. Like I was thinking a lot of Garth Green-Welles I was reading this book to at the level of the kind of slow sentence, the clause within the, you know, lots of sub clauses that kind of real, let me give you thought as it's written aloud.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think it depends, you know, what you want the book to feel like. And usually I have, you know, I said earlier, you know, I was going for have pastoral, romantic, lyrical, the seasons, the natural world, and like it felt like a novel that needed to flow and be kind of made of light and water and greenness and for me that sentence has to do that like this would not work if it was a kind of staccato punchy sentences it would be an entirely different novel and also I think because it's first person narration it gives you a sense of of who the
00:23:17
Speaker
the narrator is and this feels very him. If it was
Narrative Style Reflects Character
00:23:21
Speaker
narrated by the other main character Luke it would not be like this because I don't think he romanticizes his life. and same No I feel like there would be no commas in Luke's right it would be very full stop heavy right it's just like statements be it but yeah but that's kind of the that's the joy of this, right? That like down to a punctuation level, we are learning something about the character that we're reading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way they see the world or at least approach or would narrate the world, I guess, kind of later on, which kind of takes me to that kind of the second paragraph there. And if one day perhaps sitting at my desk, puzzling over a photograph or some snatch of memory,
00:24:00
Speaker
And if one day, perhaps that double, like I thought, if, and perhaps if this thing happens, right? This is a real idea of like a thought experiment or let me like pose this to myself. Yeah. But I think, you know, you have to, if you're doing first person narration, you have to choose your narrator well, or they have to kind of become aligned with the way that you want to write, because otherwise you'll be stuck inside a style that doesn't work for you.
00:24:28
Speaker
And this narrator is kind of ponderous. he thinks he's a lot and He's very in his head. And he is also a hesitant narrator. And you know like when Jane Austen wrote Emma and she said, like I think I've written a character that no one will like but me, I think I might have written a character that a lot of other people will like, but I don't. And and it's not that I don't like him. It's that I don't necessarily buy his excuses.
00:24:58
Speaker
For things, i um maybe I don't offer him the same grace that other people might do. I might have spent a long time with him and I'm judging him by this point. But I think he kind of uses his hesitancy as a cover for his culpability in events. And he's approaching you here as a reader hesitantly, cautiously. He's approaching his own story kind of cautiously.
00:25:24
Speaker
he kind of doesn't want to touch it but he's being forced to touch it and so I think perhaps with the commas and the double if and perhaps you're getting that sense of him being hesitant to slip into the story again maybe. Right another interview I might ask the therapeutic question here about like right we're like what are we avoiding here like what ah you know when we don't like our characters or don't like this person we've brought into the world and the qualities about them of hesitancy, right? like There's something interesting about that. Because I see myself so much in James. like I was like, oh, I know that person, or I know flickers of that person. I know that person too, which is perhaps you know maybe not what we're avoiding, but like maybe the reason I don't like him is because I recognize myself in him.
00:26:13
Speaker
I don't know if it's James or if it's love that is the enemy here but what love makes him do and what it does to the mind is it sends him into a sort of frenzy of in some way self-absorption because he is constantly trying to make the world come to him he's trying to he forgets everyone else that's important apart from the person he's in love with and we can all recognize that and he will kind of do anything for the proximity to that person whether that person kind of needs that at the time or not he is kind of forcing himself onto someone because he's so obsessed with being loved and giving love to people
00:27:01
Speaker
So I think in some ways it's a noble spur that's kind of sending him on these, on these kind of quite humiliating sometimes ways of trying to get someone to love him. And I didn't want to do too much Hardy and punish him too much, but I think he gets punishment, which I think, you know, when we come down to the the second part of this, the second paragraph, I might suggest that there's a sort of hint of punishment.
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah, because that next bit of that sentence, I might go past the medicine season, hear laughter coming like a clear bell from somewhere, someone, or maybe a sharp voice. Like, again, this kind of uncertainty that's even baked into those comments, right? Like, there's there's a thinking through of, like, from somewhere, someone, or maybe, you know, like, it like it's written it's evoking a thinking out loud to us. And whether that is thinking aloud or it's a ah ah fake thinking aloud, right? um that That the narrator is letting us into. I thought that was interesting. That goes with what you were just saying. Yeah. And I think, you know, maybe what's interesting here is the laughter is coming from somewhere else, from somewhere, from someone who's like unnamed.
00:28:16
Speaker
but the sharp voice is raised against me. I think this is still, in some ways, a sort of victim. You know, everything that's good happens somewhere away. And, you know, to go to the title of the book, he's trying to get heaven to open for him. He's trying to knock his way through into this kind of paradise that he always imagines is somewhere else. And when someone reproaches him or even says, you know, you have responsibilities to to other people, he is wounded by it.
00:28:52
Speaker
And I think that sharp voice was me trying to suggest something ah of that in this opening. But also because so much of what's come before is kind of lyrical and unspooling fluid, I think the sharp voice raised against me is like ah a kind of harsher stop here that might just send off a little ping of alarm.
00:29:16
Speaker
Yep. And even intervals of light and dark overhead, like the sun breaking through willows. And it always brings me back here one year when I am 16 years old. So suddenly we've got a real kind of funneling in, right? From this kind of speculative memory to a very specific thing. But even that, like it brings me back here. My note was like you expect a place there, right? Like it brings me back here to this location, but instead it's like, you're bringing me back to this time, this very specific time. And I really liked that. You know what you're saying? Like we live in time.
00:29:43
Speaker
I don't know whether it's Ruth Wilson Gilmore, she says like people, ah bodies in space and time, right? And we're just the overlap of those two things and we have to kind of figure out what that means. So I kind of liked the, that took me off guard when I first read it. I was like, oh, not a place, but rather a time.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he's trying to pinpoint what where it all went wrong. And I guess in him spinning back, he I kind of imagine him with a dial on his kind of memory and just kind of stopping it at 16, like that is the origin of ah everything that comes after. And then I think he's even hesitant here. And I see in this dream or this imagined reversal,
00:30:29
Speaker
You know, he's he can't quite pinpoint what he wants to call it. There's other places in the book where he thinks he has a dream, but then he can't remember if it's actually was real or not. And I think his memory of this time is is both weirdly kind of crystalline and also very hazy in the points at which maybe the damages is too painful for them him to remember.
00:30:53
Speaker
Which is very primal scene, in right? Like, not to get too Freudian, but like, it you know, it if this is his belated primal scene in which everything is catalysed around this moment that you can't quite make sense of, right? It's both real and imagined. It's both like very physical and entirely psychic because it's just projection, right? And then you get that long last sentence which, you know, is a couple of lines long.
00:31:15
Speaker
And I see this boy, right, this lone boy who might nod to me in recognition, might, or who might, double might, just as easily turn his back and we're like, okay, now we're in the world, like we know who there's going to be a boy, right? Like you are telling us who we need to be aware of this person. And and to just walk across the fields into the sunrise, into the morning and be gone.
00:31:37
Speaker
It's like we know from page one that this boy is going to disappear, right? That disappearance is going to be this huge theme for the book. That something is probably going to elude us forever, maybe. The thing about this lone boy is, and i I've been thinking about it for a little while because obviously I've read this book too many times. now I don't know who that lone boy is concretely in my head. I don't know if it's James is you like without giving spoilers. I don't know if it's his younger brother or whether it's Luke and who it is that James cares most about in this kind of moving back in time.
00:32:18
Speaker
I suppose both of them elude him. And, you know, if I love any character in this book, it's says it's Eddie. And he was also the one to whom I was cruelest as a writer. um But sometimes, yeah yeah, I felt really bad about that. I still feel bad about it.
00:32:40
Speaker
I mean, the first time I read it in the kind of first draft, I was almost thinking the boy was James, right? Like at a version of himself too. So maybe there's, there's all of these people there, right? Like that they're all standing in for kind of versions of this past. Yeah. Because he's not kind to himself, right? James, like, you know, all all the delusions, et cetera, aside that you've talked about, like he's not the most sensitive to himself, even in these, in the frame sections, he seems at odds.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah. And
Protagonist's Relationships and Influence
00:33:09
Speaker
it's also, you know, even the fact that he, he goes back in his dream and he sees a family standing there. And I think, you know, a lot of this prologue, and then I think throughout the book as well, there are moments where he just doesn't feel like his family or his family. He kind of feels that his family unit is one thing and he is this kind of interloper into the family unit. and So he finds it possible to picture his family without him in it. It was a bit later on where he he starts delivering milk on a milk ground and he has this moment where he goes up to his own family house and leaves the milk on it and he imagines to himself
00:33:56
Speaker
them all being strangers to him and and not knowing him. And I think that says something about the sort of distance he's put between himself and the world. And also, you know, the strangeness of his relationship to to love, which is that there are people around him that want to love him, that he can't let love him. And then there's this one person who he wants love from, who he spends all his time obsessing with getting it from.
00:34:27
Speaker
Maybe this is recognised for us. Yeah, I think this opening is really strong in telling us so much about what's going to follow and the themes, the images, even the kinds of language that were that we're in, but also the frame also is telling us there's going to be some kind of detachment, right? I think it's a kind of blurry opening. When I read it, I kind of have in my head like a picture that is like pixelated and colourful. I might begin to, ah you know, be focused and into place, but the opening doesn't take place anywhere and it doesn't have
00:35:05
Speaker
you know, one image that is kind of, it's extrapolating out from. It's just a series of images and impressions and, you know, things like light or laughter coming through. And to me, it feels almost as though he's, you know, like in a film when like a character gets like knocked out and then they'll have this kind of like hazy bit on the screen and then they'll wake up and they'll be like, Oh, where was I?
00:35:32
Speaker
and It feels like that moment for him where like everything is blurring and slowly kind of turning into focus. It's in like the kind of liquid place of memory that's not quite coalescing on on any particular thing until we hit the boy at the end maybe.
00:35:50
Speaker
right And even then, as we suggested, there's there's a lot of ambiguity there. I mean, that reminds me of so many of your poems, right this kind of in-between space of like clarity and not clarity. The birds, the leaves, the specific trees are like highly specific and highly charged, but like everything that's floating through and around them is is up for grabs. right Yeah, I think, you know, in some ways, it's a strange thing when you you have a first person narrator who is not like, officially the writer of the book, but kind of has to sit in an authorial position because they are kind of curating.
00:36:25
Speaker
the the story that they're telling. I think at the beginning of this book he's kind of dealing with almost like how to tell the story. You know there's a little bit just over the page, I know we're not supposed to do this, but just a little bit over the page where he is kind of imagining his his family at the table and asking himself if if they know that he's watching them he's kind of dealing with his own authorial kind of haunting of this memory like he's the ghost at his 16 year old's side and you know I'm definitely not a postmodern writer but there's something about the way in which he is kind of
00:37:05
Speaker
coming to terms with what it means to narrate this story, what he's going to make the characters do and say, what scenes he's going to repeat to himself, what he's going to kind of blur out, and I think he talks about like so kind of stitching up frames. and So I think it also gets to something about his culpability in in the kind of text that you're reading, you know, he's going to be in charge that he kind of feels in some way ambivalent about that that act. like I don't know, I can't really answer this question as as to as to how culpable people will think he is and how much he seems like he feels culpable for what happens in the book. But yeah, i do feel I do feel sorry for him at times. And I do, i
Conclusion and Book Recommendations
00:37:57
Speaker
do obviously I do like love all of the characters in this book because I spent a lot of time with them.
00:38:03
Speaker
But I guess in some ways I'm kind of guarded around people not giving him too easy a ride because I think he's very sympathetic. That can elicit pity too easily I think.
00:38:14
Speaker
That's a great note to end that bit on. and And I've got a couple of questions just on your kind of writing practice, just to kind of think about that to kind of end the episode. And given we've been talking about memory, like, do you remember your first writing memory, or at least your first reading memory? Do you remember when you first were like, I might do this or could do this?
00:38:34
Speaker
I definitely, my mum used to read to me as as a child, so I remember very clearly being read The Tiger by William Blake and thinking it was kind of the best thing ever. And I used to kind of walk around saying, tiger, tiger, burning bright. And I think that probably got something of kind of, like I was kind of afraid of that poem in a way. It's a little bit incantatory and that stuck in my head. And the first things I wrote, I used to really like writing like horror stories or like ghost as a child and I think it was because I could see like I was trying to get like an immediate reaction you know ah of fear I used to make these books and and when you turn the page something would like drop out or kind of so so I was like trying to have people so that's probably like the first the first kind of writing I did I think I still have one of them actually that's amazing I mean and that's such a kind of country move to what you're doing now right where you like the idea that so a single line would make someone have an immediate response like a jump or a yeah
00:39:34
Speaker
your writing seems to be inverted from that now, right, where like you want people to take a breath first. Yeah, I'm not going as a shock factor anymore. No, although I would read a horror novel from you, so if you want to if you want to do your Stephen King, go for it. Are there any kind of lessons, I know you teach literature rather than creative writing mostly, but are there any kind of lessons that you give your students? We've talked about close reading as a kind of practice at the beginning, but are there any kind of key things listeners might take away?
00:40:00
Speaker
My kind of archetypal lesson isn't really unimaginative. like My first lesson that I usually teach to ah classes is that I give them a poem in which I've taken the line bricks out of, like it's a paragraph, and I ask them to speak about it as a paragraph of prose, and then I ask them to try lineating it.
00:40:19
Speaker
And I'll give them one that's like not rhymed, so it's not so obvious. yeah And then I just ask them to discuss like the difference in that poem and how they understand it in all its different versions. you know ah Why did you drop the line there or here? And then here's the actual poem. What is the difference here? like How is something like a line break completely changing the way that you receive this piece of information? Because I think it kind of draws their attention to like how important a comma or a line break or whatever it might be is so I don't it's not really a very um you know experimental uh class but I think it works I guess I'm going for an hour and a half no it's great it's great I'm imagining not all listeners to this will be in those creative writing rooms that you know I think is an interesting thing to see like what we're doing and how we're doing it and
00:41:10
Speaker
what it makes a reader think about and how all of those line breaks, grammatical choices, what it looks like on the page, even like what that does to you. And I think you know like if you're if you're teaching creative writing or literature, a good thing to do is to remove everything from the thing that you've written, whether it's commas or line breaks or whatever, and then have another go at it and and move it around. And it's much easier to do now that we kind of write on laptops, because you can just kind of flick them around and save different versions of it. Obviously, a bit harder if you write long form. but
00:41:48
Speaker
Yeah I usually tell students and to to write immediately with no punctuation just as a like a splurge of ideas and then we'll sort it out after. Yeah work that later. Do you have a specific writing practice? I think we've talked about this before but like is there anything that you do? Have you got a time or a place or No. My time in places tends to be when when the idea comes to me or when I feel like it. I like to be comfortable, so you know i I'm very happy to write in bed or you know on the couch, light a candle.
00:42:27
Speaker
tea. I'm not, I, you know, like some writers kind of like to punish themselves by getting up at like 6am and setting a word count and kind of really beating writing out of them. I don't know her. No, I don't know her either. And I don't think that it would result in anything useful for me. And, you know, you only live once so you might as well give yourself some luxury while you're here.
00:42:53
Speaker
Amazing. Okay, can you give us one then luxury to kind of end, like have you got any books that you could recommend to readers? Either something you're reading now, something that's coming out, or an older text? Yeah, I was just reading a really great book by La Morna Ash. It was called Don't Forget We're Here Forever, and it's like an incredible kind of mix of La Morna Ash, you know, she's young, ah she lives in London, and she starts going to, it's like an investigation of Christianity.
00:43:23
Speaker
But she kind of goes to, you know, AA groups or kind of evangelical groups and and is kind of questioning what it is that kind of turns people towards different forms of religion. But at the same time, it's like a memoir of her own life. It's it's really good. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, I would recommend that. I think it will be out by the time this podcast comes out as well.
00:43:46
Speaker
Okay, great. I will link to it regardless. Well, thank you so much, Sean, for joining us. I really enjoyed talking about this novel with you. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please subscribe if you haven't already. Leave a review and share with people you know. You can also follow the show and me on Instagram at booksupclose and on YouTube. And if you can, please do fill out the feedback form linked in the show notes. It's really helpful to us.
00:44:15
Speaker
You can get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the sub-stack. This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.