Published 1953 / Length 280 pages
The Go-Between is a story of ill-fated love, snobbery and black magic, viewed through the eyes of an old man, Leo Colston, looking back on his youth. Leo is spending the long, hot summer of 1900 at the Norfolk home of his aristocratic friend Marcus. Marcus’s sister Marian recruits Leo to carry messages between her and a local farmer, Ted Burgess. Leo gradually becomes obsessed with the beautiful Marian, but she is engaged to Lord Trimingham, and he comes to realize that her relationship with Ted is doomed. As the heat of the summer builds, Leo is caught up in the emotional manipulation of the two lovers and the demands of social propriety, and begins to interfere in their communications – with tragic consequences. Matters draw to a head on the eve of Leo’s thirteenth birthday, when he sets in train a sequence of events that will blight his life for ever.
‘Like Henry James, his most obvious literary forebear, Hartley examines the nuances of morality with a shimmering exactness, focusing on characters … caught between natural impulses and the social conventions that would thwart them.’ – The New York Times
• The famous opening line of the book is: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Is the author trying to warn us not to judge the characters by the standards of our own time? Or is he trying to explain the emotional distance between the adult narrator and the Leo of the action?
• What are we to make of Leo’s magic spells, of the naming of characters after zodiac signs and the frequent discussion of the zodiac? What does this bring to the book?
• How well or badly is Leo treated by the Maudsleys and by Ted? Does any character in the book really like him as a person, or are they all using him for their own ends?
• How might Leo have matured if the affair had turned out differently? Would his life still have been shaped by the events of that summer?
• Are any of the characters responsible for their own actions, or are they all forced to behave in the way they do because of the demands of their social standing?
• Harold Pinter adapted The Go-Between in 1971 for the film of the same name starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates.
• The Great Gatsby by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (see here) – explores similar themes of doomed love and social class, set twenty years later in America.
• The Gambler by FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY – another story dealing with characters who are driven to extremes of behaviour by forces seemingly beyond their control.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by HARPER LEE (see here) – a juvenile narrator comes to terms with the darker side of the adult world.