The Heavens is a literary fairytale of madness, time travel, dreams and alternate worlds

Kate and Ben fall in love at a rich girl’s party. It is the summer of 2000 in New York and ‘she just stood there, smiling her liking at him’. The world is a good place and life includes grand parties, cuddling up and being head over heels in love. The rest of the cast is just as interesting ­— Conde Nast interns, mail order brides, rich people, Kate’s ideal parents who are too good to be real, Ben’s dysfunctional family, activists, artists and story tellers.
But Kate has a secret. When she sleeps, she travels to the 16^th century. She is now the heavily pregnant Emilia, mistress to a nobleman in Elizabethean England. She has a friend, ‘Sad Will’ or Shakespeare as we know him better. Emilia might be the dark lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets. And Kate might be the key between the old world of 1500s and the new one of 2000s. She believes she is the only one who can save the world from an unavoidable catastrophe. But how?

If I had to recommend The Heavens to a reader, I would not know how to describe the genre. It is definitely literary, but also speculative and taped at the edges with historical fiction. A literary fairytale, perhaps. Or let me try another way. Remember how Christopher Nolan’s Inception left us utterly hypnotized with the dreams within dreams? This novel left me unsure, bubbling with questions, exactly the same way I felt after watching the movie.

Original, Beguiling

The plot is original and tempting ­­— a maze of dreams, folk tales and minor characters. Each time Kate travels to the past, something changes in the present world. When she is back, she is often confused, sometimes indifferent. She doesn’t know who Shakespeare is (her friends tell her), she doesn’t know the political leaders of the country, she doesn’t know herself. On a parallel note in the modern world, the Twin Towers are in danger, and Ben and her old friends persuade Kate to seek the help of a therapist.

Newman’s writing is spectacular. It is lyrical and beautiful, transforming into a poetic archaic language when Kate is in the 1500s. It flows, occasionally gasps and jumps through centuries.

Madness reigns in the plot, the words and alternate universes. It is fresh, weird and told with such conviction and urgency that one pauses, several times, to take it all in and be swooped into a dream. As we approach the end, we are sucked into a psychedelic whirlpool. ‘What is real? What is the dream?’ that slowly changes into an echo of ‘Who is real’? The Heavens knocked me off my senses and I am mighty glad it did. Some books are read and some seep into your soul as an experience. The Heavens is the latter. As I repeatedly tweet, this is the ‘Book of 2019’ for me.

Final Verdict

When Kate asks ‘Are you staying’, all I want to do is to reach out to her through the pages and shout a resounding ‘YES’. That’s it. I say no more.

Rating : 5 stars