Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4380 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, "The Go-Between" is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

Customer Reviews

L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between
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
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
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.