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The Go-Between.

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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

On the surface this is a story about a boy's unwitting involvement in facilitating a love affair at the turn of the century (1899 or so), told retrospectively by that boy as a man in his 60s.

On a deeper level one could say it's about our capacity for self-deception, or about the agonies of going from the intense and uncomplicated pleasures of childhood to the tortuous emotions of adulthood. But this makes the book sound detached and overly literary, which it's definitely not. It's involving and dramatic instead.

Hartley's commanding style makes this story extremely gripping; because it's told in retrospect the narrator is as articulate as an adult, yet the emotions expressed (and somehow the ones the reader feels) are the intense and confused ones of a child. Everything seems vivid and yet nothing is completely understandable, just as it is for us as children.

This lends the book a very bittersweet feeling and a magnificent aura of mystery. It's hard to imagine this book will ever go out of style.

This book is striking as a counterpoint to Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece "Brideshead Revisited". Both were written immediately after WW2, when Englishmen, exhausted, quite reasonably gazed back at a lost time of grace and innocence.

Both Hartley and Waugh saw the falseness of that innocence, but also its deeper truth.

Hartley's story is worth reading now, at the beginning of this century, for he places it at the dawn of the last one. Leo, his protagonist, is 12 years old. He has huge dreams for the century that is breaking on him. His faith contrasts with the bitter weariness of his older self, the alternative narrator, who in 1950 lays out this story from his memory, prompted by the discovery of a childhood diary.

"Has the 20th Century done so much better than I have?" the narrator chides the memory of his childhood self. "You were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of."

1900 was the last hot summer of Victoria's England. Leo, the only child of a widowed mother, goes to stay with a much wealthier schoolfriend. He sees nothing but the glories of the Maudsley family and their special guest, the Boer war-scarred young nobleman Viscount Trimingham. He becomes enraptured in his friend's sister, the ethereal Marian, for whom he would happily die.

In an emotional sense, he will.

Marian is kind to Leo. She also uses him. How much her affection was false, how much was genuine, lies at the core of Leo's agony.

The boy acts as a go-between in Marian's illicit love for a tenant farmer, a man of physical force, a creation worthy of DH Lawrence. Leo learns that adults are not what they seem. And he takes it hard.

It is possible to quibble with this story. It stretches credulity that even a century ago, a boy on the brink of puberty could be quite so naive - or that the loss of innocence should bring so complete an emotional collapse. The young Leo seems too vulnerable, the older one, too stifled. What holds it, though, is the beauty of the writing, the evocation of a lost age - both the age of boyhood and the age when Class, with its immutable threads, bound every English soul to its own orbit. Two world wars, for better or worse, blew such certainties apart.

The story lives up to the mystery and the promise of its rightly famous opening line, the haunting and teasing truth: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

I first read The Go-Between in my English class in my last year of high school. Returning to the book some 20 years later, I found it an even richer text than I did as a schoolboy.

The author's use of the older Leo's retrospective narrative provides flexibility to alter recollections and timelines in a way that allows him to introduce symbolism to the text - the heat as a guage of the sexual relationship between Marion and Ted (he first notices its destructiveness at the moment he finds out of the true nature of their relationship by glancing at the unsealed letter) - the belladonna / deadly nightshade (even the two names provide contrasting meanings) as a symbol of Marion which he eventually destroys - phallic symbols such as the cricket bat and the gun for Ted (the latter which destroys him both physically and metaphorically).

Hartley's text is also a critique on the 20th century. The story is placed in 1900 and the great hopes of Victorian/Edwardian Britian - the progress of science, the progress of human society and the height of Empire. The shattering of Leo's life and hopes evokes the reality of the 20th century West. Denys and Marcus are killed in WW1 and the 10th Vicount and Vicountess Trimington by WW2. The signs are there at the time of the illusion of this sense of progress for the new century, with the frequent references to the Boer War and the disfigurement of Trimington.

There are some minor quibbles with the story. The emotional collapse of Leo seems disproportionate to what he saw - he may not have known what "spooning" was but he was aware of the intensity of Marion and Ted's relationship. However, it adds dramatic impact and does not detract from the brilliant integration of the text - its use of language, symbols and narrative patterns.

When you start to this read the novel you may, initially, be overwhelmed by the elder Leo's adult persecptive. Do not let that put you off this tremendous novel. The author uses a Dickensian technique to allow the aged narrator to build a narrative full of suspense and drama. The Young Leo is exploited by adults who ought to know better...The most marvellous aspect of this book is L.P. Hartley's writing which is perfectly tuned. You cannot read this novel without becoming embroiled in young Leo's dilemna.

Every time this book is read, another aspect comes into view. Written in the context of a middle aged man finding old letters and a diary in his attic, it quickly becomes clear that this man is a batchelor who has lead an emotionally shallow life. He is Leo, a boy of 12, invited to spend his summer school break with a more affluent friend and finds himself taken into a world where there are no longer any rules or structures to support him. In the chaos that he triggers he tries to find order in amongst his world and the results in doing so are catastrophic to him and the people around him. Imagery is strong, and wonderfully intertwined between the lines. Hartley's skill lets us see the characters through the eyes of a boy, standing on the precipice of adulthood and yet still living within a life of childhood fantasies where his world does make sense. He does not understand the machinations of the adults around him. Passion, deception and innocence are overlaid with stong imageries; the Zodiac, Leo is Mercury, messenger of the Gods, mercury also gauging the ever rising heat of the summer, and of those passions of the adults circling around him. Being Robin Hood in his suit of green to his Fair Maid Marian, but green also meaning innocence and naivety. Misunderstandings, the hero, disfigured, his face unable to reveal what his heart feels. The story pulls you through each humid emotion filled day to its climatic end. And at the end, what becomes of the characters, of those 'planets' circling around Leo and the virgin? Is she a calculating woman, ruthless and insensitive to the feelings of a 12 year old boy, or should a woman never be blamed for what happens? Is Leo the author of his own misfortune, despite his age? What is the use of blame? Arguably the last chapter, may be a dissapointment to some readers, for perhaps it reveals too much. There are no questions left unanswered for us afterwards. The mystery is gone. Perhaps that is what Hartley was trying to achieve.

Leo Colston is an exceptionally naive 12-year old when he goes to spend many weeks one early 20th century summer at a friend's English country home. Soon he becomes caught up in the comings and goings of two lovers with a world of class differences between them. Yet he still manages to retain his innocence, a situation author L. P. Hartley makes completely believable. Hartly pulls off the enviable trick of making Leo three-dimensional and fully fleshed-out despite his youth and his obtuseness. This ability to be unruffled by the passions around him is employed as a devastating counterpoint to the emotional implosion that rocks the family when the lovers are exposed.

My only real complaint with the book was the introduction of Leo as a grown man towards the end. It felt tacked on, and as though the book would have been better without it--as a sort of fever dream, beautifully written and left alone to stand on its own without the hard addition of reality and adulthood.

Leo, an old man in his sixties, is clearing through his old papers when he comes across his diary from the summer of 1900. On opening the diary, memories which he has burried for over fifty years come flooding back and he is forced to re-live the summer which changed his life for ever.The main novel is set in 1900 but the prologue and epilogue (post-World War II)form a framework to it.
The main themes of the novel are loss of innocence and the destruction of a 'golden age'. Leo's loss of innocence at the climax of the novel foreshadows the loss of innocence that Europe is about to suffer as the twentieth century unfolds. The emotional scars that Leo suffers are also a reflection on the world's inability to ever fully recover from the world wars.
The characters within the novel are highly effective because of their complexity - for example the reader is forced to question themselves whether Marian's manipulative nature is generated by selfishness or from the fact that she is incredibly miserably and desperatly trying to escape from her mother's social ambition.
The Go-Between is full of intense imagery including that of the belladonna plant which represents passion and female sexuality as something beautiful and highly desirable but ulitmately deadly.
The tragedy which ends the main novel is deepened by the epilogue which discusses the fates of all the characters within the novel and the way in which they appear to be 'cursed'. Whilst The Go-Between is by no means a cheerful novel, it is highly thought-provoking and provides a fascinating insight into the charmed life of the wealthly in Edwardian England before it was destroyed by the Great War.

What a shame it would be for humanity to forget how to read narrative fiction like this.

If possible, read this novel before you see the 1970 film version starring Julie Christie as Marian Maudsley, and Alan Bates as Ted Burgess. The now classic movie is unforgettable and will color your perceptions and expectations of the novel. Nonetheless, the novel does what the film cannot: Hartley gives us the fine detail of the development of a boy's moral discernment, his awareness that major questions don't always have clear answers.

The story line is simple enough. A precocious 12-year-old school boy, Leo Colston, gets the incredible opportunity to spend summer vacation at the home of a fellow student, Marcus. The residence just happens to be a large manor house in the steamy Norfolk, England, countryside. There Leo comes under the spell of his friend's much older sister; she is engaged to be married to the 9th Viscount Trimingham while she is still maintaining a passionate love affair with a local farmer, a man of a much lower social status. Leo carries rendezvous messages between Marian and Ted until Leo's increasing reluctance becomes unbearable. Leo's developing consciousness--as well as Marian's mother's suspicions--force the affair into the open.

The continuing success of this novel is due to the engaging quality of the boy's personality, the progression of his boy-like but serious love of Marian (as he nears his 13th birthday that summer), his admiration for Ted, and his respect for the young Lord Trimingham. The key to the believability of the plot is the affection between Leo and Marian: "My sister is very beautiful," Marcus said to me one day. He announced it quite impersonally . . . and I received it in the same spirit," Hartley writes, "but when I saw her next I studied her in the light of Marcus's announcement" (50). In carefully crafted senses, Hartley maps out Leo's emotional education: "So that is what it is to be beautiful, I thought, and for a time my idea of her as a person was confused and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented." Marian enables Leo to see and feel new things; at the manor house, she is the adult who is able to connect with the serious young man in the boy Leo. Marian takes Leo shopping in the cathedral city, Norwich: "My spiritual transformation took place in Norwich: it was there that, like an emerging butterfly, I was first conscious of my wings" (63-64). Later, Leo's sense of betrayal is easy to understand, but there's more to it than that; one must read the entire novel.

The Prologue and Epilogue are like bookend chapters, but also absolutely necessary to the craft of this novel; the narrator, Leo, as an older man, shows us the intersection of human psychology, and the background of tragedy that was The Boer War and World War I. Both these sections are exquisitely written, nuanced illustrations of human feeling and philosophical discernment. Also, this is a novel of place: the waterways, flat farmlands and fields of the Norfolk, East Anglia, countryside are the canvas upon which the characters act.

A tale of innocence betrayed, in which a school boy is used as go-between in an affair between the lady he worships and a farmer. A vivid picture of Edwardian England, in which the natural ebullience, complacency and optimism of the age give way to emotional defeat for all concerned. Also a good movie, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter.