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

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

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.

Resembling both Ian McEwan's Atonement and Michael 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 their 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, the speaker, 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 modern critics 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 love and love-making were adults-only secrets. Mary Whipple