Eileen Battersbyreviews The Go-BetweenBy L.P.Hartley (1953)
DURING THE hot, hot summer of 1900, young Leo Colston, a recent victim of school bullying, is invited by a classmate’s mother to the family’s country estate in Norfolk. Part idyll, part excursion into the English class system, the visit becomes a harrowing initiation into adult duplicity.
Half a century later the man who was once that boy happens upon a long forgotten diary and remembers the period recorded within its pages. LP Hartley’s beautifully brutal Jamesian tale begins with one of the most famous sentences in literature: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
Hartley evokes an Edwardian England pitched between wars, the still simmering Boer conflict and the first tremors of future upheavals.
For Leo the new century brings a determination to improve on the previous year during which his father died suddenly and he, Leo, had been so ill that his caring mother decided his health to be permanently at risk. Looking back at his young self he recognises a clever, romantic boy who tended to live in his imagination. His belief in his mastery of the dark arts had caused him some bother at school. When his tormentors pay for their deeds, Leo fears his powers yet enjoys a new found respect. The invitation offered by the wealthy mother of Marcus Maudsley, one year younger and not a close friend, introduces Leo who is genteel, if poor, to a world of languor, servants and secrets.
The imposing Mrs Maudsley is watchful, formidable; her husband is a shadowy, detached, if equally impressive presence. Leo quickly falls under the spell of their daughter, Marian, edgy, beautiful and remote, who takes a sudden interest in her little brother’s house guest. Hartley slowly and carefully, as if opening a door into a gallery of wonders, conveys the sense of a mind almost reluctantly beginning to engage with memory.
The older Leo has repressed this episode yet once he begins to remember, everything; the heat, the domestic tensions, the glances, the minor embarrassments, all return with chilling clarity.
It is an astonishingly graceful performance and a seminal example of an English writer engaging with memory, regret and that all-prevailing theme, the loss of innocence.
There is no nostalgia. Hartley assembles a well drawn ensemble cast, although the narrator’s memories focus on the family members and the rival suitors, a significant background hum is created by the other house guests.
Most inspired of all is the ingeniously vicious banter which passes between Leo and Marcus, a precocious satirist with a superior command of French. He notes each of Leo’s behavioural gaffs: “Only cads wear their school clothes in the holidays. It isn’t done . . . And, Leo, you mustn’t come down to breakfast in your slippers. It’s the sort of thing that bank clerks do.”
The temperature continues its relentless ascent. Leo’s sturdy Norfolk jacket and winter garments are too heavy for comfort. Marian decides to improve his wardrobe. Her unlikely concern thrills Leo. She however has messages to pass on to the local farmer, Ted Burgess. The house guests are finally joined by Trimingham of whom there had been much talk. Although badly disfigured by war injuries, Marian’s mother regards him as her future son-in-law. He is also a viscount and by nature a gentleman.
Leo takes a liking to him but is ambivalent about Burgess, handsome, physical and volatile, who also has messages in need of delivery. Marcus takes to his bed, allowing Leo to concentrate on performing his postal tasks.
His idealisation of his importance to Marian is destroyed when he grasps the nature of her association with Burgess. Hartley confers high symbolism on a cricket match and the impromptu concert which follows. Leo’s dreams collapse: “I feared for Lord Trimingham, I wept with Marian, but for Ted I grieved.”
The boy's ordeal shapes his life. Retaining all its charm and menace, this outstanding study of paradise lost triumphs through Hartley's elegant irony and may well have influenced Ian McEwan's Atonement.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon