The Go-Between (1953)

The household will be happy to have my attention again. It hasn't seen a flicker of it since I started reading this book. I've seen the movie. Liked it very much. Yet even knowing what was going to happen, the story in the book still felt new to me.
That's a quality in the writing; it's the kind that makes everything new. And by the end of the book, the crystalline narration , that is never precious, had made his memories, my memories. I haven't had a narrator do that since Nick Carraway. And the dialogue too, is just...right. Dialogue, when it's perfect is that--it's right. It doesn't call attention to itself. I'm in the room with them, and they can't see me. What an ear Hartley had. And often it's a 12 year-old asking the questions. Not easy. But he presses every advantage there is in this, while avoiding every pitfall.
The cricket game around the middle, was also exciting. Everything I know about cricket is from 'Netherland', and Masterpiece Theater, which is probably about as useful as having all your baseball knowledge from 'Underworld'. Hartley had all the undercurrents flowing while he sneakily explained the game just enough so I could understand the match played on the field and the one played in the stands.
The story, overall, is told quietly. Leo's plates get shifted. We all know how that plays out on the surface. The epilogue describes a life lived in aftershocks. ( )

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

An oft heard and quoted line but one until starting this book I had no idea as to its provenance. My education was sadly missing not unlike young Leo Colston's.

I won't dwell too long on the plot other than to say that a 60+ year old man finds an old diary from the year 1900 which rekindles memories of a summer spent age the of 12 with the family of a schoolfriend and their house guest, the local viscount, at their country estate in Norfolk. When his chum is confined to bed Leo looks for something to fill his time so starts to run messages between his friend's older, and seemingly mature and enigmatic, beautiful sister Marian and her secret lover, a local farmer called Ted Burgess. As the summer temperature rises so do passions between the lover's with life changing effects for both them and Leo.

Both the year and the boy's age are highly relevant to the story because we see not only a boy's dreams for the coming century but he is also about to become a teenager with all the angst that that brings. So too is the perspective of the two Leos, the young innocent boy and the older man. The book could be described as either a sort of coming of age or an end of innocence drama but this would certainy do it a diservice and would be a little simplistic as there are also elements of class, morality, friendship, obligation and love to name but a few within it.

In this day an age where youth are bombarded with sexual images in the media and other outlets it may seem a little unbelievable that Leo could be so gullible but this book was written in 1953 and is about an age before TV and Social Media. The prose is beautiful and always engaging and whilst the ending is pretty obvious a long way out, secrets never remain that way forever, it still feels shocking when it comes.

If you want in your face sensation then don't bother but if you want to lose yourself in another gentler era then this is a gem. A real classic in every sense ( )

(Spoilers - a review I wrote some time ago)
Unlike Golding in ‘Lord of the Flies’ or Hughes in ‘A High Wind in Jamaica’ L.P. Hartley does not offer one view of what children are like. Marcus Maudsley and Leo Colston, while friends, are shown to be very different in character, Marcus, having all the worst characteristics of an upper-class family, telling Leo off, for example, for folding up his clothes instead of leaving them where he had taken them off, to let a servant collect them up. He has none of the imagination that typifies Leo, in fact which in many ways seems his main trait. He is seen to be a boy who is very easily influenced by adults. His ingenuousness contributes to his downfall. Believing Lord Trimingham that a lady is never to blame, he gets a distorted view of the relationships between Marion and Ted Burgess and Marion and Lord Trimingham. In fact, what Hartley is showing in this novel is how easily children's lives can be influenced by adults, Leo not only having a break-down when Mrs Maudsley drags him along to discover Ted and Marion making love (not that she knew that in catching them she'd catch them so red-handedly), but also having the rest of his life affected by the incident. So Leo was to spend all his days avoiding relationships since Ted had shown him what spooning was ‘and after that I never felt like it’.

We also get the feeling through Leo's experiences that adults are capable of callously using children without regard for what it does to them. We discover, as Leo does, that Marion only buys him the green summer suit so that she can keep an appointment with Ted while even the green bicycle is to be given him only to facilitate the taking of more messages. In other words the innocence and well-meaningness of Leo is contrasted with the selfishness of adults, the elderly Marion even deluding herself about the events at that time, saying that it had been wonderful for Leo to have been able to have been involved in such a wonderful love affair and that he had enjoyed taking the letters when in fact he had wanted with all his heart to avoid doing that. Marion's nasty treatment of Leo is typified in her mocking him through dressing him in green and giving him a green bike, which, as Marcus readily and unpleasantly reveals, is because she thinks he is green. In a way, in fact, the contrast in this book is as much between the insensitivity of the wealthy and the well-meaningness of the have-nots. So Leo has more in common with Ted Burgess than he has with Marcus. Both Ted and Leo are victims, and though the young Leo thinks that it is his belladonna spell which has not only destroyed the relationship but also Ted, we realise it’s more Mrs Maudsley aided by a ready-tongued Marcus who forced the show-down which led to Ted's suicide. Ted is the only one who doesn’t treat Leo in a patronising way, even asking Leo's forgiveness for getting angry with him. ( )

Has anyone pointed out that part of Leo's wasted, blasted life is that he became a librarian?! Fairly early on in the prologue, Leo tells us that he has catalogued other peoples' books rather than writing is own. ( )