Youth

The narrator of Youth a student in the South Africa of the 1950s has long been plotting an escape from his native country: from the stifling love of his mother from a father whose failures haunt him and from what he is sure is impending revolution. Studying mathematics reading poetry saving money he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world wherever that may be he will be prepared to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art.Arriving at last in London however he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead he succumbs to the monotony of life as a computer programmer from which random loveless affairs offer no relief. Devoid of inspiration he stops writing. An awkward colonial a constitutional outsider he begins a dark pilgrimage in which he is continually tested and continually found wanting.