The Go-Between

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Classic and charming - Rated
This was a delightfully engaging book about the recollections of a young boy embroiled in a scandalous liaison and his feelings on the matter. It was really interesting to get a 12-year-old boy's perspective on an adult love affair and I loved the descriptive feelings that enabled me to empathise with this innocent yet astute child. It was really enjoyable and amusing yet tinged with seriousness and sadness: to witness the adult manipulation of someone so desperate to please and fit in. It also gave a rather quaint insight into upper class life. A classic with good reason.

L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between - Rated
Amazing. My reading contains two strands: crime novels, peppered every four or five books with a piece of "proper" literature. Both types of book serve their purpose, but both offer a completely different kind of experience, and this is exemplified well by this book. Reading this was a completely, vastly, infinitely different kind of pleasure. I shan't hesitate in calling a masterpiece, as it is. A brilliant evocation of a young boy's catastrophic collision with an adult world he just cannot properly understand. His rationalisations of motives and feelings is conveyed brilliantly - and one is aware of a great sense of tragedy, rather than blame. the adults are not exactly to blame for the exploitation of the boy, for they fail to comprehend his own failure of comprehension.

everying is wrought perfectly: it's a beautiful, if inherently sad book. a book about class, love, society, naivety, nostalgia, and innocent youth. it's the definite cousin of ian mcewan's atonement, and deserves to be every bit as popular. (plus, it contains the most brilliant and tense description of a game of cricket that i have come across in literature (not that they're exactly ten-a-penny anyway, but oh well...), and i have no fondness for the game whatsoever.)

a must-read, this. an absolute classic.

Readable and intelligent - Rated
The Go Between is a fine novel that is beautifully written and carefully crafted. It can be read on several different levels, either as a coming of age drama and a lament for loss of innocence or a heavily symbolic book worthy of careful interpretation.
Also made into a slow but classy film, LP Hartley's story is sad, sweet and haunting. Recommended for those sick and tired of current fiction being full of sex, violence and bad language.

Perfection - Rated
From the moment you read the book's unforgettable opening sentence "The past is a foreign country:they do things differently there" you are in the hands of a master. In elegiac,wistful and perfectly controlled prose Hartley tells a story of lost innocence.The young Leo is delighted to be a guest at Brandham Hall, the awe-inspiring seat of the rich and worldly Maudsley family. But although apparently accepted and even feted by them, his reactions to the events around him ,based on his uncorrupted values,show that he is an outsider struggling to make sense of a complex world.Caught between the egotism of the lovers and the rigid and hypocritical values of the Maudsleys, Leo's heroes slowly disappoint his youthful hopes of winning their affection.
An extraordinary masterpiece of writing-often reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day -and an exploration of memory, Hartley shows in his final pages how differently people may perceive the past.
I must add that if you buy the book go for this edition as the introduction and notes are by far the best of those I have seen.

Wistful, chaste, and utterly captivating. - Rated
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