The Young Desire It

The Young Desire It (1937) is a novel by Australian author Seaforth Mackenzie. It won the ALS Gold Medal for Best Novel in 1937.

The Young Desire It
AuthorSeaforth Mackenzie
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
PublisherJonathan Cape, London
Publication date
1937
Media typePrint hardback & paperback
Pages330
Followed byChosen People 

Plot summary

The novel details a year in the life of its teenage protagonist Charles Fox. He has left his idyllic life on an isolated West Australian farm for boarding school. There he suffers the bullying of his fellow students, uncomfortable advances from his schoolmaster and a difficult scholastic workload.

Notes
  • Dedication: To W.G.C.
  • Epigraph: "...To be free to choose is not enough. Though the young desire it, they cannot use that freedom, but must be forced into the decision of choice by good or evil circumstances which while they can perceive them they cannot control..." (Michael Paul: The Anatomy of Failure).
  • In his foreword to the novel, first included in the 1963 edition, Douglas Stewart says: "Mackenzie told me that he had invented the author, "Michael Paul", and the quotation from Michael Paul's alleged writings from which he had taken his title. He was always amused that none of his critics had spotted this harmless little hoax..."[1]

Reviews
  • Writing at the time of the book's original publication, a reviewer in Brisbane's Sunday Mail wrote: "Writing of rare fineness and delicacy immediately is apparent in this, the first novel of a young Australian...The Young Desire It defies brief description. With all the fine perceptions of the author, the novel is baffling, unsatisfying, vague, yet stamped with a certain genius that might, with more manageable material, produce a memorable work."[2]
  • The novel was reprinted in 2013 as a part of the Text Publishing Text Classics series. Alex Cothren reviewed this edition for Transnational Literature: "These are the bare bones of a coming-of-age narrative, but from them Mackenzie fashions a wholly muscular, hot-blooded portrait of a young man; a psychological profile so precise that every shift in Charles' mood carries the tension of a thriller. It is amongst the best written in the genre, a true Australian classic whose power has not diminished over the generations."[3]

Awards and nominations

Editions
  • The First edition was published by Cape in 1937.[5]
  • Re-print with Angus and Robertson in 1963[6]
  • 2013 a new re-set edition was published by Text with an introduction by David Malouf[7]
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References
  1. Austlit - The Young Desire It
  2. "Fine Writing" Sunday Mail (Brisbane), 26 December 1937, p21
  3. "Kenneth Mackenzie The Young Desire It" by Alex Cothren, Transnational Literature, Vol. 6 no. 2, May 2014
  4. "Seaforth Mackenzie Wins 1937 Literature Prize" The Telegraph, 22 November 1938, p8
  5. "W.A. NOVELIST". Western Mail. 52 (2, 704). Western Australia. 23 December 1937. p. 30. Retrieved 9 March 2016 – via National Library of Australia.
  6. Mackenzie, Kenneth (1963), The young desire it : a novel, Angus and Robertson, retrieved 20 September 2013
  7. Mackenzie, Kenneth (2013), The young desire it, Melbourne, Vic. The Text Publishing Company, ISBN 978-1-922148-54-4
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