The Go-Between

By L.P. Hartley and Colm Toibin

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

Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley’s finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend’s beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naïveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart. This volume includes, for the first time ever in North America, Hartley’s own introduction to the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781590175361

Reviews for The Go-Between

[schmerguls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This 1953 book is the second Hartley novel i've read, having read The Hireling on 25 Aug 2003. This book catches one up as the 12-year-old English schoolboy goes to visit his school friend in July 1900. There he is drawn into carrying notes between Marian, his friend's sister, and a farmer who lives four miles away. The narrator learns what is going on and tries to prevent the sister, who is engaged to a viscount, from being untrue to her fiance. The story is told very engagingly and one is eager to keeep reading. Even the ending is well-done, though at frist one seems let down by the events. This is a very good book--such a relief to read a subtle book such as this after just finishing The World According to Garp, which is as subtle as a sledgehammer.

[dmarsh451 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The household will be happy to have my attention again. It hasn't seen a flicker of it since I started reading this book. I've seen the movie. Liked it very much. Yet even knowing what was going to happen, the story in the book still felt new to me. That's a quality in the writing; it's the kind that makes everything new. And by the end of the book, the crystalline narration , that is never precious, had made his memories, my memories. I haven't had a narrator do that since Nick Carraway. And the dialogue too, is just...right. Dialogue, when it's perfect is that--it's right. It doesn't call attention to itself. I'm in the room with them, and they can't see me. What an ear Hartley had. And often it's a 12 year-old asking the questions. Not easy. But he presses every advantage there is in this, while avoiding every pitfall. The cricket game around the middle, was also exciting. Everything I know about cricket is from 'Netherland', and Masterpiece Theater, which is probably about as useful as having all your baseball knowledge from 'Underworld'. Hartley had all the undercurrents flowing while he sneakily explained the game just enough so I could understand the match played on the field and the one played in the stands.The story, overall, is told quietly. Leo's plates get shifted. We all know how that plays out on the surface. The epilogue describes a life lived in aftershocks.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." An oft heard and quoted line but one until starting this book I had no idea as to its provenance. My education was sadly missing not unlike young Leo Colston's.I won't dwell too long on the plot other than to say that a 60+ year old man finds an old diary from the year 1900 which rekindles memories of a summer spent age the of 12 with the family of a schoolfriend and their house guest, the local viscount, at their country estate in Norfolk. When his chum is confined to bed Leo looks for something to fill his time so starts to run messages between his friend's older, and seemingly mature and enigmatic, beautiful sister Marian and her secret lover, a local farmer called Ted Burgess. As the summer temperature rises so do passions between the lover's with life changing effects for both them and Leo.Both the year and the boy's age are highly relevant to the story because we see not only a boy's dreams for the coming century but he is also about to become a teenager with all the angst that that brings. So too is the perspective of the two Leos, the young innocent boy and the older man. The book could be described as either a sort of coming of age or an end of innocence drama but this would certainy do it a diservice and would be a little simplistic as there are also elements of class, morality, friendship, obligation and love to name but a few within it.In this day an age where youth are bombarded with sexual images in the media and other outlets it may seem a little unbelievable that Leo could be so gullible but this book was written in 1953 and is about an age before TV and Social Media. The prose is beautiful and always engaging and whilst the ending is pretty obvious a long way out, secrets never remain that way forever, it still feels shocking when it comes. If you want in your face sensation then don't bother but if you want to lose yourself in another gentler era then this is a gem. A real classic in every sense

[emmakendon_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, how frustrating not to be able to find the correct cover. Someone sent me a 1958 Penguin Edition of this with a 'charming' chilling cartoon of a well-dressed late Victorian (set in 1900 so only one year to the end of Victoria's reign) lady passing a note to a young embarrassed boy.So much could be said about this jewel of a book. The teller is a chap in his 60s, after two world wars, writing about the shocking life-directing events that took place around his thirteenth birthday in 1900, a time when he was advancing from childhood to adolescence and had hopes for the century ahead. he had overcome bullying at school through resilience and luck, and the luck had led to a brief adoration with him in the limelight. But at heart, this is a humble lad, a man of sympathy, and a man who knew what it was to be a coward and who could take another coward-child (in the form of a grown man) to his heart.These two are thrown together in a village with a rich household, where the daughter (destined to marry the Viscount) is having a love affair with a local farmer. We see it through the young boy's eyes - he is a visitor in the grand house because the young lady is his schoolfriend's sister. The old man narrating is presumably a virgin and never entered into a serious relationship - certainly we find him alone and green in these matters, and so the importance of the love affair is no clearer to us than it is to him.I can't say any more without giving away far too much of the sorrow and pain in this book, which is the pain of emerging from the cocoon, or of the beauty. Th edition I have starts with an Emily Bronte verse: But, child of dust, the fragrant flowers,The bright blue sky and velvet sodWere strange conductors to the bowersThy daring footsteps must have trod.This book is the rite of a wretched passage, but it is somehow a joy to read. The characters are whole, in the sense that you do give a damn about them and you enjoy much about their company (one of my yardsticks!), and the lessons are probably familiar to everyone who has grown from child to adolescent, even now.How moving to read the words of a gentlemanly narrator who could still remember the child in him, but judged him with a fatherly (if lonely) eye.

[jrimorin_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a sad, involving book. An obvious inspiration for Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT, this is perfect reading for his fans as well as fans of John Fowles. I haven't seen the Julie Christie movie -- I do not want the movie to spoil the golden-hued, drizzle-rain scented summery sensations of the novel.

[stephenmurphy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This coincided with a perfect summer holiday. It is deliciously written and wholy convincing. Beautiful.

[trench_wench · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm always interested in how books for adults are written from a child's point of view, but for me, this book had many parallels with Ian McEwan's Atonement. I found the lead characters fairly similar, and the themes also quite similar - e.g. loss of innocence, a child becoming too involved in something they don't fully understand. The settings were also similar - large country houses, in the summer heat. I'd be interested to ask Mr. McEwan if he was at all influenced by this book! Overall I did enjoy the book,the pacing seemed perfect and the characters well-developed. but maybe I'd ahve been better reading it BEFORE Atonement.

[whirled_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Perhaps it's my filthy convict blood showing through, but books about the rigidity of the British class system and what happens to the poor sods who dare try to breach its divisions tend to leave me frustrated, even appalled. I found that though it was well-written, The Go-Between left behind the same unpleasant feelings. Reading this classic novel was a bit like eating Brussels sprouts - I knew it was "good for me", but that didn't make it particularly enjoyable.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Took a while to get through this one, because of the 'Victorian' pacing, but I did enjoy L.P. Hartley's lyrical - and convincingly naive - narrator, looking back on a dramatic incident of his childhood. Like Atonement, only without the trickery, thirteen year old Leo goes to stay with his posh friend for the holidays, and finds himself caught up in the illicit romance of his friend's older sister. Leo is a great character, all innocence and gushing enthusiasm, but I would have liked to read more about the three points of the love triangle, particularly after the 'discovery'. Hartley also brings to life the golden summer of late Victorian/early Edwardian England, with passion and secrecy boiling just under the surface of the ladies in white dresses, house parties and games of croquet on the lawn.

[alisony-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's taken me longer than usual to get through this book - I was well over halfway in before I started to get drawn into the story.Set in the year 1900, a young boy goes to Norfolk for a month in the summer to stay with his school friend at their large country house. Over the course of that period, he ends up becoming the messenger go-between for the young lady of the hall and a local farmer, who are lovers. I won't give away any plot spoilers, but suffice to say it all leads up to dramatic climax.This is another book that is highly revered, yet I struggled to be completely engaged by it. For much of the book nothing of note really happened. There were no sub-plots or twists at play; everything was just slowly building up to the story ending, yet the dramatic tension only really got going in the last few chapters. The slowness would have been OK if I'd enjoyed the writing, but I found it laborious and stodgy at times, particularly in the first half. I don't mind re-reading a few passages if I'm really enjoying the prose, but I found many of the chapters quite dull. L.P. Hartley successfully typified the detached and aloof manner that would have existed amongst the upper class in that era, but somehow this limited the emotional connections between the characters.It was an interesting depiction of the darker side of an adult world slowly coming into focus for a teenage boy, and his thoughts and feelings were quite well played out, but somehow the climax wasn't as emotionally impacting as it should have been.Just 3 stars for me.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The point of this one is in the writing. The 'shock' ending is nothing of the sort; the homosexual subtext is far more interesting.

[stephengoldenberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First read this 40 years ago when the film came out. I'm now re-reading it for a course I'm doing on Film and the Book. And what a great novel it is. You get sucked in from the moment you read that opening line (has there ever been a better one?).
It's a true millennium novel written in the mid-20th century and set in1900. Reading it now, it could easily be labelled as simply another heritage, country house, upstairs downstairs, Downton Abbey sort of thing but it's so much more than that. A meditation on the past and the power and pitfalls of memory. A blistering depiction of England's class-based society. A subtle depiction of the relationship between the worlds of child and adulthood (Leo's role as go-between is a perfect metaphor). A heart-breaking portrait of the transition from boyhood to manhood. An examination of budding sexuality. It has it all, including the growing sense of tension as it nears its end.

[ginnyday · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Has anyone pointed out that part of Leo's wasted, blasted life is that he became a librarian?! Fairly early on in the prologue, Leo tells us that he has catalogued other peoples' books rather than writing is own.

[flydodofly · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

the past is, indeed, a different country: the language, the emotions, the dos and the don'ts of a time long gone - the year is 1900, and an almost 13 year old boy is in the centre of it all.

[susan139 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story of a child postman between forbidden lovers.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hartley wrote this book in 1953 and it is apparently somewhat autobiographical. It's set in the hot summer of 1900 when Leo is spending a few weeks at the home of a school friend, Marcus at Brandham Hall. The opening line is quite famous:"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."That line is important to the story because Leo is looking back on that summer because he found an old diary in a "battered" box that has brought it back to the forefront. So immediately you know this is a book about memory.Leo serves as a go-between for Marcus' sister Marian and a local farmer, Ted. Leo doesn't realize it, but they are having a love affair. Of course the reader realizes it pretty much from the get go.This book has everything going for it. Or at least everything I love. Coming of age, class warfare, dry wit, the end of the Victorian era, the real differences between how children and adults view the world, doomed love affair and the kind of writing about life in Britain that I came to love in the Anthony Powell books, Dance to the Music of Time. And possibly Anita Brookner, in a different way. Or maybe Evelyn Waugh. Or Elizabeth Taylor. Possibly Elizabeth Taylor. Oh come on, you know what I mean. Absolutely sublime. And he has a long backlist! What could be better?

[beatniq_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Growing up is a hazardous journey filled with dangerous moments; defeats which could destroy a dream and alter a lifetime. The age of 12- 13 is a transition period when we begin to move in and negotiate the adult world. We learn adult rules, and begin to see ourselves as adults see us. A story of one mans journey to rediscover, reconnect and reconcile with his past self aged 13 and thereby understand his present. Through Leo’s journey Hartley explores themes of foreignness and the learned nature of culture by counterposing social groups: across time, across generations and age groups, and across classes, and themes of forgiveness.Poor Leo, bewildered by the rules, practices and graces of adult upper class society, he is beguiled by Marian; the Venus, the mythical virgin; the Atropa Belladonna, beautiful, evil, healthy, scary and enchanting. So conflicted, sometimes ashamed, sometimes proud and triumphant, sometimes desperately ignorant, but always aching in admiration of Marian and probably jealous of her fellow stars, Ted and Hugh, the Archer and the Water carrier. Leo contents his yearning by orbiting their beguiling clique. In this fateful proximity he plays Mercury to their gods and becomes tangled in their otherworldly affairs. Until, too “green” his is unable to control the situation and it erupts, engulfing him. His childhood perverted, his adulthood a lonely perversion of life.Reviewing the past with simple nostalgia the voice of Leo is patient, tender, understanding and in this way charming and likeable. Hartley interlocks symbolic references through the story without seeming contrived or laboured. And of course, the novel begins with one of my favourite opening lines: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”.The ending though diverts the reader from the direction of travel the novel has been travelling up to that point. The journey into the past has taken some of the sheen off events, and, more importantly, people. Marian’s star no longer shines so brightly and he has greater empathy for Ted and Hugh. Perhaps also some of the sheen has come off hisself, because otherwise his acquiesce in the penultimate scene doesn’t follow. Or perhaps I expect justice to be his motivating force when it is never was. He is grieving for himself “a foreigner in the world of emotions, ignorant of their language but compelled to listen to it”. Still in the periphery, admiring wistfully.

[reichec · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written, and with an uncanny representation of an adolescent mind, this novel by L P Hartley, published in 1953, is an absolute delight. Yet it is a delight deeply overshadowed in the end by poignant sadness.It is essentially a tale of the prelude to, and the effects of, the unveiling of a passionate love affair, in a time constrained by class bigotry and intolerance of behaviour outside of rigid social norms. The illicit relationship would, from more egalitarian and enlightened perspectives, appear quite acceptable, or even considered something to be cherished. But in The Go-Between it all ends badly.It is also a story of contrasts; between irreconcilable social classes, between the innocence of youth and bitter experience, between passionate love and an appropriate betrothal, and between the joyful languor of a perfect summer and the disastrous climax of shocking exposure.The narrator is an elderly Leo Colston, looking back to an idyllic English summer at the turn of the last century. The young Leo of his reminiscence is invested with the untempered confidence of adolescence and a child’s eye for simple pleasures. Leo is hosted for the school holidays in a wealthy country manor, where he becomes the go-between of the title, carrying messages for three adults shamelessly using him to further their own ends. The pivotal person is Miss Marion Maudsley, daughter of Leo’s hosts. She is engaged to marry Viscount Trimingham, nominal lord of the manor, recently returned from the Boer War. Meanwhile, Marion is conducting a covert sexual relationship with a local farmer, Ted Burgess. Leo conveys letters and messages between Marion and each of the two men.In the course of the story, we are teased with symbols of looming disaster. Leo discovers a poisonous belladonna plant in the garden, which takes on extra significance as events unfold. On one visit to the farm, Leo seems to startle Ted while cleaning his shotgun. And on the morning of Leo’s birthday, an endless string of perfect summer days is broken by gathering storm clouds.The book is rich with fascinating character studies. In Leo’s devotion to Marian, he paints her as a flawless goddess of wisdom and generous condescension. Leo steadfastly refuses to find fault with Marion, adopting Trimingham’s view that “nothing is ever a lady’s fault”, when in fact she is arrogant and egocentric.Mrs Maudsley is the matriarch of the household, a benevolent yet stern presence. However, she loses her control on two important occasions: the first when stress compels her to retire to her quarters for an extended period over doubts about Marion’s engagement, and the second when she mercilessly impels Leo in helping her discover the fatal truth about her daughter’s affair.Poor Leo. He departs Brandham Hall in a state of mental breakdown. From the dizzying height of his twin victories, on the cricket field and on the stage (“At last I was free from all my imperfections and limitations; I belonged to another world, the celestial world”), he plummets to abject depths: “I was like a train going through a series of tunnels; sometimes in the daylight; sometimes in the dark, sometimes knowing who and where I was, sometimes not knowing”. By his own account, he is fated never to have another meaningful relationship, never to make love to anyone or be loved: “a foreigner in the world of the emotions”.The other victim is Ted Burgess. The young Leo imprecisely concludes that Ted Burgess is to blame for the end of his summer of happiness, perhaps encouraged by Marion’s dismissive assessment that “Ted is as weak as water”. At one point, Leo interrogates Ted about his apparent willingness to go to war. When Ted indicates that his fate is in Marion’s hands, Leo considers it “a cowardly speech”. Yet this is from a boy destined never to experience love, to become “a foreigner in the world of emotions”. Love: the overwhelming dominance of yearning to be with one person, to be graced by their attention and their touch, to crave their smile, their smell, their voice, and constant thoughts of whom drive out any sense of the significance of all other aspects of existence. Small wonder that in a world of intolerance and when confronted with the brutal reality of the loss of social standing, the loss of livelihood and the abrupt loss of his beloved, Ted resorts to a drastic termination.Perhaps Leo captures a fading glimpse of what it means to love someone when at the end of the book he almost unwittingly consents to carry one last message for Marion. However by then, poor Leo is in the twilight of his life and “all dried up inside”.The Go-Between is a wonderful work of deft economy, great insight and emotional depth. It is one that will stay with me always.

[crashmyparty · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A really interesting little book that I quite enjoyed once I got into it. I was very curious to see why this certain summer had got to Leo so badly. Didn't disappoint. I quite enjoyed this. 3.5 stars 

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So, I've read that in addition to being a novelist, L.P. Hartley was also a book reviewer. When asked about it, he said that he typically finished a book every day and a half and estimated that he'd read about six thousand books in his lifetime. Maybe it's a shame that he didn't live to see LibraryThing. Amazing as Hartley's reading habits were, they do help put "The Go-Between" in context: it is exactly the sort of book that an industrious book critic would love. Its language is dense, formal, and finely tuned, its various symbolic structures are consistent and well-articulated, and its characters are well-drawn. Even so, it's a bit of a drag to read. How much you'll like it will probably depend on the sort of novel and the sort of writing you enjoy and how interested you are in the book's time period and themes it explores, most of which to do with class and morality and all of which are given an extremely British treatment. Readers who admire carefully constructed plots and good prose will enjoy "The Go-Between", but those who prefer looser, funnier, more freewheeling texts should probably go elsewhere. Perhaps these two groups might be able to find some common ground in the novel's opening line, which is truly one for the ages. I imagine that the author worked for years to come up with something both so insightful and so beautiful in its simplicity.This isn't to say that aren't some elements of "The Go-Between" that aren't exceptionally well done. What I might have enjoyed most about this novel is its exceptionally perceptive take on childhood. Leo Colston, our titular character, is still very much on one side of the divide that separates children from adults, and the author's very good at portraying the cognitive distance that separates him from the book's other characters. In contrast to his host, Marcus, who is portrayed a pure product of his class, Leo is an individual, but his understanding and moral sense are still at a very early stage of development. In most respects, he's still very much a schoolboy. Hartley -- like Richard Hughes, whose "A High Wind in Jamaica" also portrayed the differences between adult and child mindsets beautifully -- sees children and adults almost as different species, and Leo gets caught up in this affair largely because there is simply no way he would be able to understand the implications of what adults ask of him. There are times that he seems almost painfully naive, and I caught myself wishing that somebody would step in and explain the fact of life to this poor kid, but the novel is set in the late Victorian period, after all, and Leo is a product of the bourgeois. Hartley doesn't skimp on the details: he also provides an impressively thorough explanation of the the schoolboy code of honor and an uncanny transcription of Leo and Marcus's peculiar schoolboy dialect. Not that there's a lot of childlike wonder here: while the author's observations are undeniably perceptive, some readers may find that the adult version of Leo, who serves as the book's narrator, leaves too little to the reader's imagination. Still, that might be a matter of taste. Recommended to readers who enjoy well-crafted prose and well-structured novels, as well as those interested in Victorian family life or literary depictions of childhood. "The Go-Between" is hardly a fun read, but it is a good book.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've had this on my tbr for a long time and I am happy to finally get it read. This book was published in 1953 and is the coming age story of a young boy who is 12 going on 13. He is a dreamer and a romantic but also very black and white in his thinking. He is rather naive, a boy who is raised by his widowed mother. He really has little understanding of adult worlds. The story starts with a 60 y/o man who finds a box in the attic that triggers memories from a summer visit to Norfolk as the world is entering the 20th century. It is a story of the loss of innocence. It is a time period of transition from childhood to adolescence. There is some contrasts between class but it isn't the main theme of the book. "Dimly I felt that the contrast represented something more than the conflict between Hall and village. It was that, but it was also the struggle between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and defiance of it, between social stability and revolution, and defiance of it, between social stability and revolution, between one attitude to life and another."