Book of a lifetime: In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch

From The Independent archive: ‘In Youth is Pleasure’ by Denton Welch

A self-portrait of the author, alongside his second published novel (National Portrait Gallery/CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

I was a typical teenager. I loved Egon Schiele and The Smiths. At school break, I’d run down to the river to skim flat pebbles and drink Whiskey Mac with classmates. Our blue and gold uniforms sparkled in the sun, and I’d retreat to the shade to read Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure. It begins “One summer, several years before the war began, a young boy of fifteen was staying with his father and two elder brothers at a hotel near the Thames in Surrey.”

This is a threshold time, before the devastation of war, before the devastation of adulthood. Orvil Pym is the boy, a rough-haired strange boy who takes us on a heightened, sensual journey. There is little plot, simply an artful third person that allows Orvil a direct line, and makes the ordinary astonishing. For Orvil, Peach Melba – the tinned variety – is “like a celluloid cupid doll’s behind” and the “diminutive tombstones” of a pet cemetery are like “a giant’s dominoes”.