‘Love is a verb’ is the type of phrase you might find on a throw pillow in the homeware department at TK Maxx, as a subhead in a self-help book, or in the lyrics of a contemporary song. Linguistically speaking, it seems true enough: in many languages, the word ‘love’ shifts from object to action without much fuss, and in English, it undergoes no derivation at all. But if love is action, how does it move? This question is at the heart of a pair of debut novels by Anthony Shapland and Seán Hewitt which confront the intractable operations of love and desire with exceptional clarity and verve.
In Shapland’s A Room Above A Shop, set in the late 1980s, two men from south Wales foster a tender and tenuous connection as the HIV/AIDS crisis grows catastrophic and homophobia abounds. In Hewitt’s Open, Heaven, a chance encounter with a property listing catalyses a thirtysomething divorcee to retrace his steps back to the small English village where he fell in love for the first time, shortly after coming out. For the protagonists of these books, romance feels as promising as it is perilous.
As Anne Carson suggests in Eros the Bittersweet, the lyric poets of Ancient Greece understood romantic love or eros as an autonomous force, one that simultaneously connects and separates lovers, suspending them in liminal space. From Sappho to Socrates, eros has been characterised by presence and absence, delight and doom: to love is to ‘reach’, infinitely, for the beloved. Take James, the narrator of Open, Heaven, who daydreams about his paramour:
I can still see him there, on the doorstep, and when I think of it now, I can feel something still of the warm glow of elation, the way I felt light, how all I wanted to do was touch him, hold him, grasp his arm or his shoulder, to make sure that he was real.
The sensory experience of eros as a destabilising force is thrust into the foreground. When James is present with his beloved, there’s a sense that he isn’t fully there, yet when he’s gone, he feels miraculously near. Both of these books describe the dilemma of desire from up close: you can practically see sparks as their characters dance across the latticework of erotic feeling, perpetually out of sync. The mind is perpetually outpaced by the body. In Open, Heaven, a heartbroken James rushes towards a stone figure before he can fully understand its artifice, ‘holding his arm with a firm but gentle grip, as though I couldn’t think…’ As B prepares to meet M, in A Room Above A Shop, he speaks of ‘the stir in his gut; why he washed so attentively; why he’s wearing his good clothes […] He’ll go to hell for what he wants, but still he climbs.’ The heart reaches; the internalised homophobic ‘conscience’ reels. For both sets of characters, the great ‘limb-loosener’ of eros, as Sappho had it, prompts action before the mind knows why, or to what end.
A Room Above a Shop formalises the forced anonymity imposed on many gay couples at the time by redacting the full names of its protagonists, whittling them down to initials. B, still in his early twenties, is at the pub, yearning to escape the tedium of the village, when he meets M, the local shopkeeper, who offers him a job and a bedroom upstairs. M is nearly ten years his senior, well-liked and ‘big and clumsy, shy’. A slow unlearning begins: both men gradually abandon ingrained social scripts, entering a new intimacy that alternately inspires and overwhelms them. As the life they create inside the shop gently expands, the village and its inhabitants seem to grow more suffocating. Signs of impending collapse are everywhere for the couple. In the high summer heat, fights break out in town, wallets tighten, and the wooden shop stairs begin to rot. A stream of information and misinformation on the HIV/AIDS crisis infiltrates the shop through newspapers and government leaflets (Don’t Die of Ignorance), brought in by customers who are casually cruel and newly vigilant for signs of ‘perversion’ in the community. Of course, these are the same customers on whom M and B’s livelihood depends. When they’re finally alone in the evenings, M and B worry about their efforts to protect their secret, about the epidemic claiming lives across the country.
Shapland’s prose employs a pointillist technique: subjects often vanish from his poetic, pared-down sentences. M and B’s mutual desire reacquaints them with the movements of their senses; in thrall, they notice ‘Food and breath, the sap from trees.’ Even their shop inventories are evocative (‘Foreign currency, slot-machine tokens, tooth-dented counterfeit pound coins’). This deliberately indirect style thrives on ambiguity: it’s often unclear who is doing what, which serves the narrative well as the characters grow more intertwined. Frequent scatterings of compound words betray the intimacy between M and B while highlighting the idiosyncratic beauty of their surroundings: ‘bog-soft’ earth, ‘winter-dry’ air. Descriptions of the natural world filled with juxtaposition and mystery pull the protagonists and reader closer together.
While A Room Above A Shop shifts perspectives between its characters, Open, Heaven invites the reader to experience the motions of eros through a single narrator, James Legh. After his marriage collapses, James embarks on a journey back to his childhood home to uncover the roots of his relationship to desire itself, leaving the city for the country and the present for the past. In the small English village of Thornmere, he’s surrounded by memories both tender and caustic, feeling himself an awkward observer behind a one-way mirror as he reflects on his adolescence and his relationship with Luke, an older, rough-around-the-edges boy under the care of Mr Hyde, the local farmer. James marvels at the vividness of his daydreams, stunned by the aloof ghosts of his past. He writes:
They do not know me now – years beyond them – still waiting for one of them to sense my presence in the room, or in the garden, or beside the bed, and to turn their gaze on to me and smile.
Hewitt tends faithfully to his protagonist’s longings, capturing their attendant light and shadow in atmospheric, meditative prose. If James struggles with social expressiveness—he often presses a nail into his palm to exorcise his own shyness—Hewitt gives him a meticulous attention that captures every note from the bouquet of unfettered countryside that he calls home. The resulting impression is of a story in continuous bloom, dappled with descriptions of ‘the tender, feathery bronze of the beech leaves, the soft blush of the hazels, the gold-tinged edges of the young oaks.’ James’s descriptions of the natural world in the wilds of Thornmere offer a material intimacy with his own desire.
In both books, the body cuts a path through the pastoral towards the enchantments of erotic desire. The characters’ experiences of shame start to feel out of place in the unpeopled grottos and mountaintops of the countryside. In the wilderness, both pairs find themselves pulled towards the forces they can’t control: James’s imagination reels while the normally unflappable Luke loses his footing; B and M surrender to the current of a stream, circling ‘fast as fish.’ For the couples, caves and eddies provide spaces where bodies can enact desire more freely and play is still possible. When the temperature drops, B and M lie in bed, surrounded by blankets; M imagines they’re snug inside a chrysalis, conjuring a defence against their inevitable separation.
Throughout these novels, the movements of eros find their analogues in the cycles of nature, seasons and celestial formations, at once inevitable and alluring. When M and B emerge from the depths of a secluded lake in A Room Above a Shop, Shapland writes:
A mist thrown out, refracting light in a halo of colour. He looks up at god’s rock. God not god. Y godwr–the rising, the spring that starts the river that shapes the valley.
Y godwr is a Welsh phrase, short for y godwr cynnar, which is usually translated as ‘the early riser;’ in other contexts, y godwr can also mean ‘the fee collector.’ In this passage, Shapland casts god/God in upper and lowercase–both the exalter of spring and the tax man, all at once. The reader is reminded that, eventually, a price could be paid for such unbridled desire, that death or devastation might come around to settle accounts.
Not long ago, stories about queer couples were essentially required to end in tragedy; like the Hays Code of Hollywood studios, which mandated that gay characters had to be associated with ruin, the BBFC’s (British Board of Film Classification) homophobic mandates outlawed positive portrayals of gay couples until the late 1960s. For all their tragic elements, A Room Above a Shop and Open, Heaven offer nuanced, affirmative portrayals of queer love that resist these long histories of mandated unhappy endings. Yet the trepidation with which these characters approach intimacy and identity indexes the material conditions of their oppression: for B and M, trapped in the village, ‘muggy dreams suffocate movement and propped-open windows only let in heaviness.’
What resolution is possible for the dilemmas of desire, which bind its devotees while breaking them apart? It’s worth noting that both Shapland and Hewitt’s books feature a striking image of a crescent moon in their final paragraphs. Accompanied by flashes of light, these moons act as codas for the rising of the sun, y godwr cynnar. In A Room Above A Shop, the moon is shown secondhand through a photograph, already a memory. In Open, Heaven, the moonlight beams from James’s past with Luke. For these characters, who are closest to one another at night, the moon is a container for desire, the patron saint of a ministry of seclusion in which they have been forced to participate.
These books do not represent the beloved as someone to be understood, even mastered—a dark corner that the protagonist seeks to illuminate. Instead, they thrive in the half-light, capturing the quick, brilliant flash of love, drawing out the details of desire’s reach. There is no solving the precarity of eros, made all the more unstable by the conditions that shape the experience, the pain, and the possibility of these queer love stories. To behold this desire is to escape time, submit to longing, and to participate in love as motion, in the ecstatic dance that defines the sun’s relationship to the moon.