Product Description

A man in his 60s looks back on his boyhood for the first time in 50 years, recalling events that took place on a summer visit to a Norfolk country house at the turn of the century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232744 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Fab Book
This is the only book I have ever read twice in succession - it really is wonderful. As the heat of an Edwardian summer rises, so the passion between two lovers from different social classes grows. They use a boy to run messages back and forth from the big house, across the park to the tied farm.

It is clear to us that the boy, the go-between, is being used. But through his eyes he is the cause of whole affair and therefore responsible for its tragic end. Something that affects the rest of his life.

The film starring Julie Christie is not a patch on the book and gives a very one-dimensional reading of a deep and complex tale. However, if you want to know where it was filmed - it is Melton Constable Hall in Norfolk which, the last time I sneeked in to see it, was a devastatingly romantic semi-delapidated gem.

Sometimes, Love Isn't The Answer
In the uncharacteristically hot English summer of 1900, Leo Colston, a middle-class school-boy living with his widowed mother, is invited to spend his holidays at the home of a wealthy classmate. Leo is seduced by the lifestyle of the wealthy Maudsley family, and develops a crush on the eldest daughter, Marian. When his friend is confined to his room by illness, Leo finds himself pressed into service as a go-between for Marian and her secret love, a lowly local farmer named Ted. With only a very limited understanding of how the world of grown-ups works, Leo tries to make sense of this relationship, and struggles to use his school-boy logic to prevent it from devastating both himself and everyone around him

It is surprising that many people have interpreted this novel as a tragic love story, in the vein of a thousand tales from Greek myths to Romeo and Juliet to 'Titanic'. But to make this interpretation is to fall into the same mistakes that the young Leo initially does. Marian is not a virtuous paragon – she is a flighty, manipulative young lady with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. Ted is not a hero – he is, as the novel’s older characters hint, a hot-tempered charmer who can't keep his pants on. In fact, if anyone comes out of this well, it’s Viscount Trimington, who shows himself to be a perfect gentleman. He is, tellingly, the only one in the love triangle who shows the slightest bit of self-discipline.

There seems to be no doubt in Hartley’s mind that Marian and Ted are in love, but he does not suggest, as so many bad songs do, that love conquers all or, more importantly, that everything done in the name of love must be forgiven. Love, allowed free rein in Marian and Ted’s hearts, destroys them and everyone connected to them. Hartley does not paint Hugh or Mrs Maudsley as repressive villains who stood in love’s true way, but as interested parties who got caught in the crossfire. He seems to regard the lovers as unfortunate fools who either couldn't or wouldn't show a bit of restraint. It is a fresh perspective, and one that probably doesn't come out in literature enough.

But possibly the most attractive aspect of the novel is the murkiness of the characters’ motivations. Do Ted and Marian actually like Leo, or are they just using him? Leo is never quite sure, and neither is the reader. In the end, we can allow the evidence to sway us either way, or come down uneasily in the middle. Love can redeem the wicked, but it can also corrupt the good.

Wistful, chaste, and utterly captivating.
Resembling both McEwan's Atonement and Frayn's Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent's naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence.

Leo's summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host's sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby. Catastrophe is inevitable--and devastating to Leo. In descriptive and nuanced prose, Hartley evokes the heat of summer and the emotional conflicts it heightens, the intensity rising along with the temperature. Magic spells, creatures of the zodiac, and mythology create an overlay of (chaste) paganism for Leo's perceptions, while widening the scope of Hartley's focus and providing innumerable parallels and symbols for the reader.

The emotional impact of the climax is tremendous, heightened by the author's use of three perspectives--Leo Colston as a man in his 60's, permanently damaged by events when he was 12; Leo as a 12-year-old, wrestling with new issues of class, social obligation, friendship, morality, and love, while inadvertently causing a disaster; and the reader himself, for whom hindsight and knowledge of history create powerful ironies as he views these events and the way of life they represent. Some readers have commented on Leo's unrealistic innocence in matters of sex, even as a 12-year-old, but this may be a function of age. For those of us who can remember life without TV and the computer, it is not so far-fetched to imagine a life in which "mass communication" meant the telegraph and in which "spooning" was an adults-only secret! Mary Whipple