Of course I first read it at teacher training college. It’s about a child’s thought processes and they were keen on that. Memories of it were, to an extent, later over-shadowed by the 1971 film starring Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Edward Fox (no less!) and no one who saw it could ever forget the cricket match shot with more dramatic subtext than Harold Pinter at his most intense. A friend recently asked me to read the first draft of a novel he’d written in which he mentioned The Go-Between which reminded me that it was probably about time I revisited LP Hartley’s 1953 masterpiece.
Leo Colston is in his sixties looking back on the hot summer of 1900 which he spent at the country home of a wealthy school friend, Marcus Maudsley. Leo was twelve/thirteen at the time. His birthday is part of the plot. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” as he observes in one of the most famous openings in literature. He starts and ends with the 1950s in the finding of old diaries and, eventually, a “present day” journey back to Brandham.
Son of an impoverished Boer War widow, Leo’s life experience is very limited although he finds ways of seeing off the bullies at school. Once he arrives at Brandham he is made very welcome by the family especially by Marcus’s older sister Marian who he finds enchantingly pretty. He also meets the affable Lord Trimingham, hideously disfigured by the war but, it seems, likely to marry Marian. Leo quickly learns how to behave, address people, manage formal meals and take part in day-to-day activities although, in his own mind he’s very much the confused outsider. He knows nothing of sex or adult relationships but Hartley ensures that the reader sees past the narrator and understands exactly what the situation is. In short, Marian is having a clandestine affair with Ted, a local farmer from a very different background (a faint whiff of Lady Chatterley’s Lover?) and Leo, unknowingly becomes the deliverer of written and, sometimes oral, messages between them: the titular “go-between”. Eventually he realises what is going on, sees things he shouldn’t, is desperately traumatised, blames himself for Marian’s liaison and becomes ill.
The cricket match, for me, remains the most memorable incident in the novel. It’s an annual fixture, when Brandham people play a village team and it’s all apparently matey. Leo is drafted into the Brandham team as twelfth man. The villager’s best batsman is Ted but he is, in a sense battling it out with Trimingham at every level. Scores are close and then something unexpected and dramatic happens – I’ll spare you the spoilers.
It’s a novel full of insights about adolescent thinking and a lost age of innocence. Two world wars were fought between Leo’s childhood and his finding of the diaries. So the past really is a foreign country. The characterisation is strong – we’d all like a decent man like Trimingham in our lives. And Mrs Maudsley is convincingly drawn. It’s also a powerful exploration of social class mores, habits and attitudes at the dawn of the new century.
I’m rather glad to have rediscovered it.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Esther Waters by George Moore
