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: #157083 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Customer Reviews

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. Mary Whipple

A book that makes you want to hurry up and live
If you have never read Emily Bronte or Samuel Beckett, come to that matter, this book will startle you with its depth, its profundity, its beauty and its desolation. I suppose it has connections with Remains of the Day, as well.

An old man discovers a diary which takes him back to the most significant moment in his life, in 1900, when he was only twelve, and spent nineteen days as a go-between, as a taker of messages for a woman he thinks is a goddess, and a farm-labourer who he wishes to grow up to be like. As the story moves towards the devastating collapse of their relationship, we as the readers discover that he never recovered from the way that the young adults mistreated him in his past, and in the epilogue are reminded again of his barren present, an individual destined never to surf emotional waves as he did when he was twelve, nearly thirteen.

As well as the compulsion of the narrative, the information from Leo's diary means that he can recall his own observations on the adult world from the enlightened eye of childhood, which are very funny, and this means that this novel preserves the potential (which the present-day Leo has lost) to realise that uncorrupted, unselfish outlook in the most childlike part of ourselves. By the way, lots of children's books do this nowadays - but I think this ability was less well-developed in the 1950's. Read it!

A secretly Gothic novel...
This novel has all the elements of Gothicism in it which is only apparent after a few reads. The Zodiac symbolism is interesting and Leo's innocence is sometimes amusing, sometimes infuriating and cringe-worthy. A great read about the nostalgia of childhood with a genuinely upsetting ending. Beware of the footnotes in this edition as it gave away the story to me when i followed them!