The Hireling

It's not a term I'm in the habit of using, but this story really is haunting. A driver is employed by a wealthy young widow to drive her around the cathedrals outside London. He is single, without family or friends, but tells her stories about a family he has made up just to have something to say to her, to fill the air. She becomes hooked on hearing about his family, he falls in love, but they are of different social tiers... I know how it sounds. But Hartley was an accomplished novelist and the ending stays with you.

Leadbitter,the driver of a hired car,gets a contract to drive Lady Franklin on a series of journeys to Cathedral cities.Both are emotionally damaged characters and each seriously affect the other.At the start Lady Franklin is helped by Leadbitter after the death of her husband but later as Leadbitter tells her of his fictional family,and they become more desperately involved,thing begin to go awry.
This is a quite wonderful story which is told simply but with great skill.

3789. The Hireling, by L. P. Hartley (read 25 Aug 2003) I wanted to read something by this author, who won a James Tait Black award in 1947 and who has a book on Anthony Burgess' famous list of 99 best novels published between 1939 and 1983. But this book, which came out in 1957, is the only book by him I could find in town. So I read it. It is not a bad book, and lives up to the description that Hartley is one of those rare novelists who knows what he wants to do and goes about it with a minimum of waste. It is an account of a hired car driver who sort of falls in love with the upper class woman who has him drive her around to get over the death of her rich husband.

The story of a woman and her driver.

L. P. Hartley, uno de los más notables novelistas de la Inglaterra de mediados de siglo, pertenece a la tradición de la novela de sensibilidad, de tono más reposado que vigoroso, más civilizado que apasionado, que iniciada por Jane Austen tendría en la figura de Henry James a su más alto exponente. La maestría de Hartley para el estudio social y los finos matices psicológicos nos ha legado varias obras imperecederas, entre las que destaca su célebre novela "El mensajero", magistralmente llevada a la pantalla por Joseph Losey.
"El alquilado" (1957) se centra en el análisis de dos caracteres socialmente contra puestos. Por una parte, el de la joven y atractiva viuda lady Franklin, a quien la pérdida de su marido ha provocado una show more suerte de incapacidad emocional; por otra, el de su chófer de alquiler, el gallardo y estoico ex soldado Leadbitter, quien para sacar a la dama de su ensimismamiento, se inventa una vida imaginaria acerca de su persona y se lanza a una atrevida iniciativa que desencadenará un final dramático e inesperado. show less

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