The Go-Between (New York Review Books Classics)

The summer of 1900 promises to be a special one for twelve, soon to be thirteen-year-old Leo Colston. It means a break from school where he was being bullied because other boys discover in his diary his more advanced use of vocabulary than they are used to until he makes up and places a meaningless curse in the diary and two of his nemeses fall from a rooftop. It means going to the home of his best friend, Marcus Maudsley, at Brandham Hall and participating in a sumptuous lifestyle totally foreign to him and his lower class family. It is also a summer during which Leo finds himself surrounded by more adults than he is used to and finding himself often ignored and surprisingly alone, especially when Marcus comes down with a case of the measles. Of the grown-ups in the family, Leo is most intrigued by Marcus' sister, Marian, who gives the boy more attention than the others. The Maudsley family anticipates Marian marrying Viscount Hugh Trimingham, wounded in the Boer War. Leo is "anxious... to be `something' to" Marian. It is during an outing to the river for bathing that Leo first sees a neighbor, Ted Burgess, a farmer "tenant of Black Farm." Seeing the nearly nude, muscular, powerfully built man (the first adult male body Leo has really ever seen), speaks to Leo "of something" he cannot identify. Leo wonders: "What must it feel like to be him, master of those limbs, which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field and exist for their own strength and beauty?" Through happenstance, a need to belong and make himself of value to others, as well as Leo's attraction to both Marian and Ted, the boy quickly finds himself ensnarled in adult affairs that he doesn't fully understand but which will have considerable consequences for many.The Go-Between (1953) is considered to be writer L. P. Hartley's (1895-1972) finest novel.With Leo as his narrator, Hartley gives readers a captivating and utterly believable portrayal of innocence and naïveté in The Go-Between. Unfortunately, it is also a story of betrayal on more than one level. Eager to please and certainly more sensitive than he is willing to admit, Leo is grossly taken advantage of by both Marian and Ted who are quick to see the advantages of Leo serving them as an intermediary, delivering secret messages between the two, arranging clandestine meetings. They are equally swift and effective in winning the boy over, appealing to his needs and seductively acquiring his confidence in a matter that he little understands and which he does little to try to comprehend. Hartley pulls off the almost impossible in that readers, fully aware of what is going on and cognizant of how Leo is being used, should detest the two adults for what they do. However, Marian and Ted prove to be almost as beguiling and charming to the reader as they do to Leo. Although readers never see them as two distraught, frustrated lovers, since the couple are shown only through Leo's eyes, they are seen in somewhat sympathetic light and in his Introduction to his novel, Hartley even admits "as the story went on I softened towards them."In The Go-Between Hartley not only spins his enthralling tale of Leo, Marian, Ted, and the others gathered at Brandham Hall, but spends a great deal of time bringing the summer of 1900 and life of the upper class to life. Hartley's style in the novel is to write using considerable detail--detail that is quite evocative and appealing to the senses be it sight, smell, taste, or the feel of anything from textures to heat and humidity. Readers are treated to a picture of the calm before the storm--before the evils of World War I would forever change Britain and the rest of the world with its unlimited horrors. Dinners and an almost endless menu of entertaining guests, shopping extravaganzas (especially for clothing that is both appropriate and worthy of the status of the wearer--something that is totally foreign to Leo), and games of cricket are portrayed in detail and as each event comes and goes readers watch with some degree of horror as Leo begins to change, adopting the ways of the privileged. Leo accurately sums up his own evolution stating, "I was in love with the exceptional, and ready to sacrifice all normal happening to it."At the same time as he chronicles the good life, Hartley gives subtle clues that nothing will or can stay the same. There is tension between the classes, the haves and the have nots, and Marian and Ted's affair certainly is nothing that either the Maudsley family or society is likely to find acceptable. Hartley's almost obsessive references to the weather of the summer of 1900 and its growing heat and discomfort serves as a beautiful metaphor for what is to come both on the personal level for the mismatched trio of characters as well as to the world as a whole. When Leo accidentally discovers how he is being used (although he never really comprehends fully what Marian and Ted are doing), he is left feeling "utterly defeated and let down," deep with "disappointment and disillusion" with the need to regain his "self-respect." Soon, Britain as a nation would experience much of the same.The final portion of The Go-Between is a spellbinding rendering of the death of innocence. Leo is torn between loyalties, especially when it comes to Marian who he deems "combined the roles of both fairy and mother: the magical benevolence of the one, the natural benevolence of the other." Wishing, hoping, and waiting for things to work themselves out does not pay off for Leo and neither does turning to subterfuge. Desperate to set things right, Leo reverts to what appeared to have led him to success in school with the invention of a "spell" involving some deadly "nightshade" (belladonna) which weaves in and out of the story like an ominous portent. Ironically, just as before, his curse is followed by a drastic change of events, but they are nothing attributable to Leo's "magic" or anything the child could ever wish to happen. Instead, he is brought face-to-face with real life and its tragic possibilities and he comes to the realization that he "had been playing a part, which seemed to have taken in everybody, and most of all myself."In an Epilogue (which Hartley admits he was chastised for writing), the author skips forward fifty years, allowing Leo to make some final discoveries about that special summer in 1900 as well as about himself which ironically shows readers that time and experience has not truly altered Leo Colston all that much. Paradoxically, in this Leo is not alone. He and the reader also learn the fates of some of the people with whom he spent time, and a not altogether surprising twist about the fate of Marian.The Go-Between is an unexpectedly thoughtful and stimulating story; not necessarily what a reader might expect from a novel about a child's loss of innocence in a time of innocence. It is also an expressive work of art and a delight to read.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." One of the great opening lines of fiction, but not entirely a true one. For the fascination of looking back to the time of one's youth is not just to record the many things that were indeed different, but to get a handle on perhaps deeper qualities that remain obstinately the same.Yet in Hartley's case looking back from mid-century to 1900, a lot really had changed: two world wars, the passing of the Golden Age, the erosion of the class system, the birth of the welfare state. Leo Colston, triggered like Proust before him by a trivial object, thinks back to the summer just before his thirteenth birthday, when he spent three weeks with the family of a school friend at Brandham Hall in Norfolk. A July of unbroken hot weather, spent with privileged and beautiful people, culminating in such events as a cricket match (one of the finest in English fiction), a concert, and a ball. Young Leo is welcomed by the Maudsley family, given new clothes, made much of, and secretly enrolled as the carrier of messages between Marian Maudsley and Ted Burgess, a young local farmer. Not that Leo understands what is going on; he tries to be a conscientious narrator but is inevitably a naive one. His ignorance of so much that the adult reader understands is one of the many delights of the book.To Leo's (and Hartley's) fifty-year perspective, add another fifty years or so for my own. For though the private boarding-school world of Leo and his friend Marcus Maudsley has largely vanished now, it was still the everyday environment of my own schooldays. There is a chapter in the book (one in which the boys converse almost entirely in French) that seem obscure today, but bring my own memories flooding back. The beastliness of boys to one another, their arcane codes, and minor triumphs. One's awkwardness as a son of the professional classes mingling with genuine aristocrats, feeling out of place, sensitive to small snobberies, never knowing if apparent welcome is condescension in disguise. And to be twelve! The total ignorance of sex but fascination with it. Crushes on charismatic adults of both sexes, and utter desolation when they have no time for you. These are not just memories of my own life, but the stuff of Hartley's magnificent novel, recalled in all their terrible power.Hartley, in his preface to a later edition (which should absolutely not be read beforehand) says that he originally planned the novel as "a story of innocence betrayed." But he found himself softening towards Marian and Ted and responding to their passion, even though we see them virtually only through Leo's eyes. It is not they that the reader would cast as villains, so much as the odious snob Marcus and his domineering mother. But writer Colm Toíbín (in an insightful preface that can indeed be read before the book) points out that Leo the child remains essentially unchanged as the Leo of the epilogue, and that the past, so far from being foreign, speaks strongly to something native in the author, in Toíbín himself, and many readers too. His final sentences are worth quoting:"...the book turns out not to be a drama about class or about England, or a lost world mourned by Hartley; instead it is a drama about Leo's deeply sensuous nature moving blindly, in a world of rich detail and beautiful sentences, toward a destruction that is impelled by his own intensity of feeling and, despite everything, his own innocence."

‘The Go-Between,’ is a novel which I have meant to read for a long time. It has, of course, one of the most famous opening lines in literature - "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Published in 1953, it is narrated by Leo Colston, who is sixty-odd when we first meet him, but is looking back on events in the hot summer of 1900, when he visited a school-friend, Marcus Maudsley, and his family, at Brandham Hall.This is a very evocative novel, which really encapsulates the past well. We begin with Leo’s story at school, where he is bullied and his life made a misery, before somehow a chance event causes him to become something of a hero. This experience gives him a certain confidence, so he is thrilled to visit Marcus in the holidays. There is even a titled guest; a Viscount, who allows him to call him by his first name, as well as the lovely Marian, Marcus’s sister.Leo’s family life, alone with his widowed mother, is much less grand that that of Marcus, and he is impressed and eager to please. It gradually becomes apparent that Marian is destined to become engaged to the Viscount, whose family seat is Brandon Hall. However, she is attracted to the tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, and, when Leo is asked to take notes between Marian and Ted, it leads to a tragedy which Leo tries to understand as an adult.Everything about this novel is sublimely beautiful. It seems almost odd now that a boy like Leo, about to reach his thirteenth birthday, is really so unaware of the reasons for his message taking; but, as the author tells us in the beginning – it was a more innocent time and very different. The setting is evocative of those rare, beautiful, English summers. It involves class, cricket, croquet on the lawn and picnics. The small victories, and crushing embarrassments, of childhood and the awareness of adult life on the periphery of Leo’s senses. A wonderful novel and one which encapsulates so much about a certain time so well.

This is a gem of an example of the writer gradually building up very subtle references which bit by bit accumulate for the reader without their realising it. It is a long hot summer, the temperature is building up in every sense: you know that something will implode in the end. We are in 1900, when some things that are socially acceptable now,were not so then. Marian, the girl at the Hall,conducts her affair with the local farmer with discretion. The story unfolds through the eyes of Leo, the 12 -year-old visitor to the Hall, who is presented as a greenhorn. He is symbolically bought a green suit. He is also Robin Hood, the ultimate altruist. He is the go-between of the title, carrying messages between the lovers in an affair that is socially forbidden. It is a great pity that the book is remembered for its opening line ("the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there") as it is not the best quotation. I liked Leo's response when asked if he could keep secrets: "I was a natural oyster."When Leo as an adult visits the now elderly Marian (a plot device I found rather artificial) she says "there is no spell or curse except an unloving heart," and you are left wondering if she is referring to her own mother Mrs Maudesley and the extreme reaction to that affair so long before. A truly memorable book

“The Go-Between” is a book that I lost myself in and one of those rare books that I wanted to start again as soon I finished – indeed, I did re-read the Introduction by Douglas Brook-Davis and the first chapter.As a novel which has the theme of time and memory at its core, it has stood the test of time well, and the early 21st century reader can now look back a half century (and more) to the time of its writing as well as the half-century between the events that are described and their narration.I became immersed in the story, on one level in the setting – the Norfolk countryside during the hot summer of 1900 – the sky, the fields, the smell of the hay and the sounds of cricket and swimming parties. The descriptions are perfect, if a little unfashionable for today’s pared-down prose, for example – the deadly nightshade: “The sullen heavy purple bells wanted something of me that I could not give, the bold black burnished berries offered me something that I did not want.”And I became lost, too, in the landscape of young Leo’s mind: a boy on the brink of turning into a young man, the loss of childhood omnipotence, the realisation that the world does not revolve around him, and the disillusionment as his imagined “Golden Age” crumbles around him.The novel employs the use of symbolism, much of which is explained at length in the introduction and the notes in this edition, but my belief is that it can be enjoyed without understanding every reference. However, this does add yet another layer of depth to what is an extraordinarily good novel.

Finally got this on kindle, after years of reading my old 1970s paperback (with Julie Christie on the front - from the film). This is one of my favourite top 3 books (Jane Eyre & Great Gatsby the other 2). Hartley brilliantly evokes an Edwardian summer in a norfolk country house, the events of which will stay in the mind of our young protagonist Leo, for the rest of his life. The heat seems to come off the page and although the narrative may seem a little stately, the events unfold at just the perfect pace. I re read every few years and it never disappoints.

A wonderful intricately told story about the deep inside personal story told in retrospect of a young pre teen boy given responsibility he did not understand and could not handle. Such depth is rarely seen in books nowadays yet the first sentence quoted in the headline above immediately seizes the readers imagination.Was he drawn into the lovely Marion’s confidence then betrayed? Read it and discover for yourself.