Aubade is a flawed novel yet it is also more affecting than countless other novels that are technically far more accomplished but say precisely nothing. Kenneth Martin wrote it in five weeks in the summer of 1956 when he was sixteen. It’s a largely autobiographical gay coming-of-age story about Paul, a boy from a working-class family, who has just left school and meets and falls in love with a slightly older student.

From a strictly literary point of view it would be very easy to pick Aubade to pieces but that, I think, would be to miss the point in a big way. For all its stylistic naivety and stilted dialogue it possesses a sometimes uncomfortable emotional honesty that could only have come from a young author writing truthfully about his own experience. Had Martin waited to recollect his youthful experience in tranquility the result might have been more polished but, I expect, would have lacked the raw edge which is such a vital part of this book.

I was genuinely moved, not so much perhaps by the writing itself, as the fact that a working-class gay teenager in the viciously homophobic Britain of the 1950s had the courage and self-belief to write it at all. This might not be a literary response but it is a real one and, whatever its shortcomings as fiction or literature, I expect this novel will stay with me long after I have forgotten many much more formally skilled ones. Sometimes what touches the heart has less to do with how ‘well written’ something is (always a value judgement, of course, and by no means necessarily a permanently enduring one) as what the writer is saying and when s/he wrote the book and why. These things are not irrelevant and can actually deepen our understanding and appreciation of a piece of writing. This is certainly the case here and I recommend the 1989 GMP edition as it contains a long and fascinating autobiographical introduction by the author.

Aubade is no masterpiece but deserves to be known by anyone interested in the history of gay literature. ( )