L. P. Hartley (1895–1972)

It's the long, hot summer of 1900. Middle-class schoolboy Leo is staying at the home of his much wealthier school friend. His hosts put on a lavish round of picnics, sporting events, and dinners, dress well, and have dozens of servants—but their stately home is rented, their money made rather than inherited, and they clearly hope that their beautiful daughter, Marian, will help their social mobility by marrying into the nobility. Marian's heart lies elsewhere, however, and she turns Leo into the "go-between" of the title, a naive young boy who is unaware of the import of the messages he carries on her behalf. Many years later, an adult Leo recounts the events of that summer with the benefit of hindsight.

I confess that I largely picked up The Go-Between from the library on the strength of its often-quoted banger of a first line, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." For the first section of the book, I thought I had made a real mistake in doing so. L.P. Hartley spends a long time in setting up the novel's themes and symbolism, in a manner I found formal and laboured. Once we get to Brandham Hall, and we see the disjuncture between what a naive, sheltered twelve-year-old is capable of understanding of what's happening around him and what is visible to the reader, things become more engaging. (Apart from the lengthy description of a cricket match. Ye gods. Not even Dorothy Sayers was capable of writing about a cricket match in a way that didn't make my eyes glaze over.) But then there's that epilogue, where Hartley's narrative instincts seemed to fail him.

Far from a bad book, but not one that lived up to my expectations of it.… (more)

I had watched the movie first. Then I got the book. I went into it with a little hesitation since I thought of it as very plot-driven story and therefore "spoiled" by having watched the movie. Boy was I wrong. One thing that comes through much better in the book is the emotional development of the boy even though it's being told from his adult self years later. All of his actions were supported by credible motivations, and there was no feeling that the author put something in "just to make it interesting." And as the plot develops, the boy's thinking gets more complex. For some people the language will be a challenge, but I found I fell right into it and it added a lot to the feeling of distance with the past, as is the boy's past really were a foreign country.… (more)