The Go-Between

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

I'm a sucker for a story where the narrator recalls events from his or her earlier life. Be it Brideshead Revisited or A Dance To The Music of Time, there is something about the mix of nostalgia and melancholy in such books that strikes deep.

The Go-Between is one such book. A tale of childhood, deceit and desire at the dawn of the 20th Century, it is told in flashback and is quite wonderfully written. Leo Colston is a man of 60 years or so, a buttoned down, repressed individual with no memory of the events of a long, hot summer in 1900 until he chances across his old diary from that year and it all comes tumbling back.

Invited by his school friend, Marcus, to stay at Brandham Hall for the summer holidays, Leo becomes embroiled in a love triangle between the rough and ready farmer Ted Burgess, Marcus's older sister Marian and the scarred war veteran Trimingham. Persuaded to carry messages between Ted and Marian he becomes entangled in an adult world he doesn't understand, where class and the rigid mores of Edwardian society make for a dangerous game.

Across that baking hot summer Leo is cajoled, flattered and finally pushed to breaking point by Marian and Ted's illicit affair (although he has no idea that that is what it is), made all the more painful by his knowledge that Marian is engaged to Trimingham.

Hartley's prose flows like silk across the page, immensely satisfying to read, never hard going. His poignant tale of a Leo's world being turned upside down by the adults around him is superbly told and although you can see what's coming by the end, it is still shocking and painful.

An excellent book that has a deserved reputation as one of the best novels in English literature.