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In the late afternoon of a day in February, that hottest of Australian summer months, when a brutal sun stood bronze above the river flats which you may see from the dormitory windows of Chatterton, Charles came to the school with his mother, walking from the railway station to the gates by a private path across a burnt, untidy field, overhung with Cape lilacs that still drooped, dusty and melancholy…In the lower part of his belly fear kicked and pulsed like a child in the womb, ready to be born.
Fifteen-year-old Charles Fox is sent away to boarding school, innocent, alone and afraid. There one of his young teachers, Mr Penworth, develops an intense attachment to him, seeing in Charles the sensitivity that is missing in the other young ''savages'' under his charge. The erotic charge underlying this infatuation(which culminates in a stolen kiss) is beautifully and sensitively handled by Mackenzie, especially for its time. However, it is when Charles meets Margaret, a girl staying at a nearby farm for the holidays, that the main emotional and erotic life of Charles is realized. This passionate, unforgettable romance is written with exquisite subtlety and poetry, luminous and deeply moving.
Published in London in 1937 to wide acclaim, The Young Desire It is a stunning debut novel about coming of age: an intimate and lyrical account of first love, and a rich evocation of rural Western Australia. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is now back in print for the first time in years with a new introduction by David Malouf, who calls it ''perhaps the earliest novel in Australia to deal with the inner life in a consistently modernist way''.
Paperback, 345 Pages, Orig. Publ. 1937, This Ed. Publ. February 2016
Author: Kenneth Mackenzie