In Youth is Pleasure

Several years before the war a 15 year old boy named Orvil and his two older brothers, Ben and Charles along with his widowed father stay at a luxurious hotel in the countryside of Surrey for the school holidays.Troubled Orvil tolerates Ben but mostly hates Charles and does his best to steer clear of him. With little else to do, he explores the hotels vast grounds and spies upon people.Permanently wrapped in his teenage angst and dreading going back to school from the moment the holidays start, Orvil is in a perpetual state of unease.All he really wants is to be left alone.He meets various characters during his stay at the hotel but there's very few he feels at ease around.There's seems little Orvil can look forward to.This short novel is like nothing I've read before. Firstly there's no real plot. It's basically a simple slice of a few weeks of summer about a boys awkward perception of the world, his own inner turmoil and fears.Despite the lack of any real story line I felt compelled to follow Orvil's summer 'adventure'. As you read on he turns out to be quite a character, exhibiting some rather 'odd' subversive behaviour.It's clear he's uncertain of his sexuality and, although incredibly subtle, you can detect the homosexual undertones in various scenes.What really makes this such an enchanting read is the beautifully vivid imagery created by the writer relating to the outdoor scenes. Welch paints a picture of such clarity of Orvil amusing himself in the luscious hotel gardens that you believe your there watching him. The book has a very real feel of escapism about it that is intoxicating and something you wish you were a part of.This book may not be for everyone but if you're looking for an intriguing piece of literature that reads like a piece of art then IN YOUTH IS PLEASURE could be for you.

Published in 1945, "In Youth Is Pleasure" is the second novel by Denton Welch, a work where this author is already at the peak of his powers. It is a short, compact book, but you only have to read a few paragraphs to be hooked by its fascinating style. A plotless work (not a flaw), it simply recounts the events in the life of fifteen-year-old Orvil Pym during a summer holiday spent in Surrey,in the period preceding World War One.What really makes the difference here is the astounding poetic quality of this prose, a trait which can be directly linked to metaphysical poets such as John Donne. All the reader's senses are switched on by vivid, finely sculpted descriptions of people and places that, in perfect metaphysical style, juxtapose contrasting, unexpected images to produce unforgettable results. This vision pervades every line of the book and produces an omnisexual tension sometimes blurring the line between pleasure and pain. Young Orvil is a shy but very intelligent boy who has to face some serious problems such as the death of his mother, his "strange" appearance (he looks a lot like a girl), the bullying from his schoolmates and, last but not least, his nascent erotic pulsions that, albeit still unfocused, tend towards voyeurism and sado-masochism.All these themes,never presented as abstract but springing from the inmost nature of the various, at times humorous episodes, blend seamlessly throughout the book; the reader will find himself at the core of a fervid adolescent mind, thrilled and shocked at the same time by a delightful narrative rhythm sometimes disrupted by violent scenes, two of which occur at the end of the work and put many of the preceding events in a darker perspective.Orvil's fears and reactions to the world cannot help connecting with any reader's former adolescent self; the author's investigation is courageous, never clichéd, always aiming at the truth of experience. On closing the book, we will know that there is a shard of Orvil in each of us, even if we were not aware of that before.Definitely a masterpiece, "In Youth Is Pleasure" is a perfect starting point to explore the compelling world of Denton Welch.

Fantastic. Really good read. denton was such a wonderful a wonderful writer. Do yourself a favour and buy this book you will not be disappointed,

Unsettling.

Excellent - little known book with great characters.

In spite of the small scale of the novel and its focus on the perceptions of a 15-year-old who spends much of his time exploring on his own, this is a great piece of writing. Every word is expressive but without any sense of laying it on thick. The descriptions are simply amazing. Initially I wondered whether this would apply more to objects, and that Denton Welch would not match it in his human interactions, but in fact these turn out to be just as unerring in their evocation of the precise situations and the various figures that festoon the narrative. I found A Voice Through a cloud oddly memorable as well, and it remains with me years later; so I shouldn't have been surprised at Welch doing it here in this earlier book. It recalls Louis Malle's film Le souffle au coeur the most, I think, Orvil being an English equivalent of Laurent, with his two older brothers, the somewhat formal father, and the poignancy around the mother, although in this book she has died three years earlier. This sets the tone for a lot of the episodes. This one is largely set in a smart hotel in Surrey, and its environs; in the film it is a hotel at a spa. Sexual undercurrents abound, given with a comparable subtlety, and sense of life-affirming immediacy. But what vividness, really - and so much suggested between the lines. For a book about solitude, it absolutely pulsates with life!