Heaven and Earth by Paolo Giordano, review: a devastating marvel of a novel

Hot off the heels of his urgent essay on the coronavirus, How Contagion Works, comes the fourth novel by Paolo Giordano, an Italian physicist, entitled Heaven and Earth; big in theme, languid in pace and exquisite in execution.

It follows the relationship of Teresa, a well-off Northerner, with three “brothers” from a dilapidated farmhouse near her grandmother’s villa in Puglia, where she spends the summers. Bern – with whom Teresa falls in love – Tommaso and Nicola are semi-cultishly brought up by Nicola’s father, and the three have an intense bond which Teresa can never quite understand. They grow up, things get complicated. The now thirtysomething Tommaso recounts to Teresa the terrible event that bound the boys together, then tore them apart.

The plot is deftly handled, moving from a secretive steamy teenage romance in Speziale to a cave in Iceland – taking in fringe eco-activism and a doomed attempt to conceive a child along the way. What links them, aside from the dreamy lyricism of the prose (“the foam-slick rocks, the silent sea, and, all around, the mercilessly bright night of the South”) is Bern’s tortured grappling with his faith. Muddying Teresa’s understanding of Bern and his demons is the doubt, first raised by her grandmother, that you can ever truly know another person. Teresa, on hearing Tommaso’s account, realises that their experiences coexist: “Not one story, but two, I kept telling myself, both real… Two versions like the opposite edges of a box, impossible to see together, except with the imagination.” Bern is a different man to each of the friends, his heart “a convoluted rabbit warren, full of tortuous burrows, one for each of us”.

The novel’s Italian title Divorare il cielo, or “Devouring the sky”, is more evocative of its darkness. Teresa worries about the “frightening immensity” of Bern’s love, a love so all-encompassing it suffocates. Giordano’s novel is a devastating marvel.

Heaven and Earth by Paolo Giordano, translated by Anne Milano Appel, is published by W&N at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 ?or visit the Telegraph Bookshop