The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

 

 

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Resembling both McEwan's Atonement and Frayn's Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent's naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence.

Leo's summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host's sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby. Catastrophe is inevitable--and devastating to Leo. In descriptive and nuanced prose, Hartley evokes the heat of summer and the emotional conflicts it heightens, the intensity rising along with the temperature. Magic spells, creatures of the zodiac, and mythology create an overlay of (chaste) paganism for Leo's perceptions, while widening the scope of Hartley's focus and providing innumerable parallels and symbols for the reader.

The emotional impact of the climax is tremendous, heightened by the author's use of three perspectives--Leo Colston as a man in his 60's, permanently damaged by events when he was 12; Leo as a 12-year-old, wrestling with new issues of class, social obligation, friendship, morality, and love, while inadvertently causing a disaster; and the reader himself, for whom hindsight and knowledge of history create powerful ironies as he views these events and the way of life they represent. Some readers have commented on Leo's unrealistic innocence in matters of sex, even as a 12-year-old, but this may be a function of age. For those of us who can remember life without TV and the computer, it is not so far-fetched to imagine a life in which "mass communication" meant the telegraph and in which "spooning" was an adults-only secret. Mary Whipple

Amazing. My reading contains two strands: crime novels, peppered every four or five books with a piece of "proper" literature. Both types of book serve their purpose, but both offer a completely different kind of experience, and this is exemplified well by this book. Reading this was a completely, vastly, infinitely different kind of pleasure. I shan't hesitate in calling a masterpiece, as it is. A brilliant evocation of a young boy's catastrophic collision with an adult world he just cannot properly understand. His rationalisations of motives and feelings is conveyed brilliantly - and one is aware of a great sense of tragedy, rather than blame. the adults are not exactly to blame for the exploitation of the boy, for they fail to comprehend his own failure of comprehension.

everying is wrought perfectly: it's a beautiful, if inherently sad book. a book about class, love, society, naivety, nostalgia, and innocent youth. it's the definite cousin of ian mcewan's atonement, and deserves to be every bit as popular. (plus, it contains the most brilliant and tense description of a game of cricket that i have come across in literature (not that they're exactly ten-a-penny anyway, but oh well...), and i have no fondness for the game whatsoever.)

a must-read, this. an absolute classic.

A superb piece of storytelling concerning the doomed affair between upper-class Marian Maudsley and local farmer Ted Burgess told through the eyes of 12 year old Leo who they enlist as their go between. The story becomes both magical and mysterious as the emotional path of the love affair sucks the Maudsley family and Leo into its destructive vortex. Unputdownable.

A sublime account of a forbidden romance during the long hot summer of 1900 told through the fantastic viewpoint of 12 year old Leo. He arrives to spend his summer at Brandon Hall with the upper class Maudsley family and becomes the messenger between the seductive and amoral Miss Marian Maudsley and Ted Burgess, a rough and hot bloodied tenant farmer, and also between the indelible Lord Trimingham (who intends to marry Miss Maudsley) and Marian. Hartley tells us right from the off that a tragedy is going to be the outcome but he cooks the story beautifully so that the reader is sucked inside the closed world of Brandon Hall and its cast of characters.

There is layer on layer of metaphor and allusion but never done in a difficult or abstruse manner so that there is something of the detective story about the writing where objects, sensations or turns of phrase mentioned on an earlier page come around again in a more sinister, twisted or adult form later on; and Hartley plays with the reader laying a trail of items and people - rifles, poisonous plants, hot headed brothers, duelling ancestors and so on that might feature in the forthcoming tragedy. In the meantime Leo and his friend Marcus check the temperature every day and as the mercury rises so does the heat of the lover's passions as their story comes to the boil.

Hartley is a superb writer, with the knack that many gay men have of noticing and reciting all the details of a scene and understanding how actions betray sentiments; but Hartley does it without the archness or tomfoolery that turns this art into show business, leaving instead a clear outline of his characters without seeming to have made any effort.

The relationships between Leo and Marian, Leo and Ted and between Marian and her two lovers are hypnotic. Marian is a sensational baddy willing to achieve her objectives at all costs. But unlikely a Hollywood bad guy she does not simply snarl her way through life - although she can do that well enough - she has a Swiss Army Knife of practical and emotional tools she uses to get her way. In particular she causes Leo to fall in love with her and bends him to her will. Leo (and Hartley I suspect) is also in love with the rugged, muscular and athletic Ted - a man of the soil with skin the colour of the corn he grows - and Leo shuttles back and forth between the lovers like a puppy dog. But when Leo realises that he is being used he turns against them and this lets loose the tragedy.

Hartley tops everything that has gone before with the Epilogue where Marian and Leo meet again 50 years later and now Hartley reveals the true extent of Marian's wickedness and the self delusion that goes hand in hand with it; and one last time she bends the pliant and emotionally starved Leo to act as her Go-Between.

This is a really magical book which is both complex and easy to read, has a driving plot and yet hovers and lingers over the scenes and people that make up its world. The only criticism I can make is that Leo's character flits between naivety and sophistication in a way that is sometimes hard to take in, but since the 50 year older Leo is narrating I think Hartley gets away with this peculiarity.

Very strongly recommended.

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5.0 out of 5 stars a wonderful book
A bitter sweet story of a young boy turning 13 and starting to fall in love in 1900; his 63 year old self looking back on the events of that very hot summer when he acted as... Read more

Published 4 months ago by William Jordan

5.0 out of 5 stars An English gem
One of the most beautifully written books in the English language. If I ever do get cast away on a desert island, this is my book choice.

Published 5 months ago by Michael Mood

5.0 out of 5 stars The death of innocence

First published in 1953, in this book Leo looks back to the summer of 1900 when he turned thirteen and was as full of optimism as the new century. Read more

Published 6 months ago by Roman Clodia

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb, haunting, atmospheric
This is a great novel. Whenever I think of it the first thing that comes to mind is the stultifying summer heat which permeates nearly every page. Read more

Published 11 months ago by Mrs Norris

5.0 out of 5 stars Poor Leo
This is a wonderful evocation of its period. Hartley captures beautifully the world of the young Leo Colston, contrasting his innocence with that of his friend Marcus. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Mesange

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully crafted slow burner
A great book which builds so slowly that you almost think it's not ever going to reach its climax (don't skip to the last page, you really will spoil things for yourself). Read more

Published 18 months ago by Scarficus

5.0 out of 5 stars Quite perfect
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there ... from the first sentence I was entranced by this masterpiece of a novel, set during an Edwardian summer heatwave... Read more

Published 19 months ago by booksetc

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, enchanting and gut-wrenching.
I would put L P Hartley in the Premier League of English novelists. This book encapsulates so much of what it means to be English. Read more

Published 22 months ago by William Cohen

5.0 out of 5 stars My new favourite book
Once you get into the Go-Between, it keeps you enthralled right until the very end. Forget all this hollywood, bestseller type of fiction- turn to a book which actually has some... Read more

Published on 5 Aug 2009 by Whyareyouonyourowntonight

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic and charming
This was a delightfully engaging book about the recollections of a young boy embroiled in a scandalous liaison and his feelings on the matter. Read more

Published on 18 Aug 2008 by Net

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