(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024)
Charlie and Nick are in love.
Really and wonderfully, deeply and assuredly in love, and free from does-he, doesn’t-he vibes of earlier volumes of Heartstopper where the attraction was clear but the certainty of connection was not, the two guys can finally turn their attention to other more pressing matters.
Such as will they do the deed? Are they even ready to do the deed?
It mightn’t seem like something you really need to overthink but if you recall from the stories that precede Heartstopper volume 5 by Alice Oseman, Charlie, still in recovery from anorexia and grappling with sizeable body image perceptions, and Nick, newly out as a bisexual man but still not sure what that looks like for him, and so, the seemingly simply and often impetuous act of sex takes on a whole new meaning.
While the two high school seniors – one in the Australian equivalent of Year 12 (Nick) and one in the year below (Charlie) – are coming to grips with what it means to express their undeniably sweet and charming love physically, they’re also having to figure out what it will mean for their relationship when Nick goes off to university.
He’s not sure entirely sure what he wants to do with his life, and he faces that age-old teenage dilemma of being put on the spot to pick a specialty when you’re still trying to figure out who on earth you are.
After all, he’s only just worked out he’s bi, and how they want him to work out what his job should be for the next 40 to 50 years? Or at the very least the qualification that will influence it?
It’s a LOT to deal with and Oseman does her usually empathetically brilliant job of evoking what it’s like for someone so young who’s still growing up and becoming equipped with the tools they need to supposedly figure out life – do any of us ever fully acquire the tools to do that? Not really but shhhh tell no one – to figure some fairly fundamental things about themself.
While Charlie may not have the weight of there future academic world weight upon his shoulders, he is trying to figure out what life will be like for him, both when Nick is no longer around in a day-to-day capacity – he says he’s OK with going to a local Kent university but his heart is really with a rugby-loving tertiary institution up in Leeds which he visits on a road trip with Elle and Tara – and while Nick is here and sending Charlie into some fairly intense hormonal arcs where the need to do more than kiss is becoming, ahem, pressing.
Each of the guys, and their found family circle of close friends, who gather at one point for Charlie’s sixteenth birthday and reaffirm why this community of queer people outside the societal “norm” – let’s be honest; heteronormative stuff is not really all that normal, but rather the prevailing orthodoxy of the day by which everything is rather close-mindedly judged – is so important to all of them, spend Heartstopper No. 5 doing their best to understand who they are, what they want individually and crucially together, and what that means when it comes to things like sleeping over, going to university and being together and, sadly, eventually, apart.
As has been the case with all the earlier volumes of Heartstopper, which shows young gay love in a way that inspires and delights and gives those of us who experienced it under a cloud of guilt, terror and societal condemnation, what it means to just be yourself in all its queer glory.
And for those young enough to be living in this far more queerly progressive age, which is far from perfect admittedly but a damn sight better than what went before, it is their lives writ and drawn large, and with an authentic sweetness that doesn’t talk down or make light of anything but which, quite rightly, equates gay coming of age tales with their straight counterparts in a way that normalise the previously neglected queer experiences.
That’s important because while it’s thrilling to have the slew of legal right available to many, though not sadly all, across the world, it’s just as crucial that people who aren’t queer understand what it means for those who are not in the sexual and cultural mainstream.
While the Heartstopper series is not necessarily there to educate those outside the camp, with its primary aim to give queer people of all stripes the chance to be seen and represented in all their coming of age authenticity, that’s effectively what it’s doing and it’s a good and wonderful thing that it does.
But whatever the results of Oseman emotionally evocative storytelling, which owes as much to its graphically rich drawing as its heartfelt dialogue and honesty of experience, what sits at the heart of the series overall, and Heartstopper No. 5 in particular, is the love story that is Charlie and Nick.
While we get to see what Tao and Elle, Darcy and Tara are up to, and how their lives are playing out – while the TV adaptation on Netflix has broadened to give full voice to all the characters in true ensemble style, the graphic novels stay closely focused on Nick and Charlie in the con text of their wider friendship circle – it’s Charlie and Nick’s story that takes centre stage and which takes its place in your heart once again (assuming it ever left which is doubtful; after all, how can you not love how much these two sweetly lovely guys love each other?).
Heartstopper volume 5 has them front and centre and Oseman beautifully explores what it’s like when the relationship is a sure and certain thing and kisses can be stolen at school and hugs at home, and everything else that comes from knowing with unshakeable surety that you are loved and love just as assuredly back.
Sure, there are challenges and Nick and Charlie have a few key ones to deal with which they do ways heart-troubling and not, but Heartstopper No. 5 is a love letter to what happens when the flirting and the attraction have found their sure and certain relational home, and you are with each other without question, and you can deal with all kinds of obstacles and opportunities because you know that other person is unquestioningly in your life.
It’s scary and unsettling at times, but mostly wonderful and exciting, and Heartstopper volume 5 captures it all in charming and authentically honest ways that place queer love on the exact same footing as it’s far more well-documented straight counterpart and sing the praises of love, belonging and community such that the full, oft-neglected of human sexuality and life experienced is fully and finally well represented with all the queer heart and soul anyone could ask for.