AvonVilla reviewed The go-between by L. P. Hartley (New York Review Books classics)
World war, class war, war between the sexes
5 stars
This brilliant novel seems like an entirely new book every time I re-read it. At first it's a tragic coming-of-age story as a man recalls the traumas of his boyhood. Every reader feels for young Leo, when we remember the squirming torture of being a self-conscious child, gasping for breath when being forced out into the airless world of adulthood, .
Then there's the story of forbidden love, a doomed affair between a working class man and an upper class woman, so tragic and compellingly told by Hartley, whereas D.H. Lawrence was always so turgid and ugly.
It can be about class: the alliance between the aspirants Leo and the working man Ted, up against the landed gentry Marian and Hugh - and above all the disgusting Marcus, Leo's supposed friend who is the only one to let his true self show in all its supercilious ugliness.
It's about history …
This brilliant novel seems like an entirely new book every time I re-read it. At first it's a tragic coming-of-age story as a man recalls the traumas of his boyhood. Every reader feels for young Leo, when we remember the squirming torture of being a self-conscious child, gasping for breath when being forced out into the airless world of adulthood, .
Then there's the story of forbidden love, a doomed affair between a working class man and an upper class woman, so tragic and compellingly told by Hartley, whereas D.H. Lawrence was always so turgid and ugly.
It can be about class: the alliance between the aspirants Leo and the working man Ted, up against the landed gentry Marian and Hugh - and above all the disgusting Marcus, Leo's supposed friend who is the only one to let his true self show in all its supercilious ugliness.
It's about history and war. Even in 1900 the men are scarred by it, threatened by it. As the older Leo looks back through the lens of the mid 20th century, not only are his personal hopes shattered, all his childhood dreams of a new era have been replaced by the real history of two atrocious world wars. Most of the players in the drama of his childhood have been killed in a futile conflict.
It could be read as a coded expression of Hartley's own homosexuality, especially in the lingering descriptions of farm labourer Ted and his radiant masculinity.
And it's also a tapestry of nature and symbolism, with the summer heat, the deadly nightshade, the idyllic pleasures of the decadent aristocracy. Even a cricket match is woven into the meaning and emotion of the story. And I loathe cricket.
I'm normally a genre fiction enthusiast; somehow the hyper-real worlds of science fiction and fantasy cut through and reveal more about reality to my particular array of neurological receptors. But "The Go-Between" transcends that. The past is another country, but it might as well be another planet, home to another species. That makes it somehow more revealing about us and our own real world in all its beauty and terror.
