The Go-Between by L P Hartley reviewed by Gillian Southgate

 

 

This novel was the March book-circle choice, and I recommend it absolutely. It deals with lost innocence, and shows how a young life of hope, expectation and ideals can be scarred by the duplicity of adults. Leo, the boy invited to Brandham Hall in Norfolk by a schoolfriend, experiences at the age of 13 a trauma that causes him to have a nervous breakdown, and undermines his trust in the grown-up world to such an extent that he is rendered impotent, in all senses, in later life. Leo is made so real in his young naivety and hero-worship of the adults he views as gods, that the reader is drawn into his mind and feelings; thus we identify with him, wanting him not to be hurt. The novel is set in 1900, a year that carried for Leo all the promise of hope and expectation of good in the coming 20^th century, but it could have been set in this one, or the one before.  Trust can be dashed in any century, and at any time, at the hands of indifference or misuse, and the story of betrayal is timeless. It might have been handled in a florid way, as modern novels tend to do, but the book doesn’t deal in sensationalism; it respects the reader by treating the narrative with sensitivity and in elegant style.

 

Vulnerable as he is away from home, and full of pre-pubescent tangled feelings, Leo finds himself a messenger, carrying love letters between a tenant farmer and a young woman called Marian Maudsley. She is the daughter of another tenant, a successful city businessman who is renting Brandham Hall from the 9^th Viscount Trimingham, whose family own the estates that it sits on. Maudsley’s wife is engineering a marriage between the Viscount, Hugh, and her beautiful daughter, for social advantage. Marian knows she must marry Hugh, and also knows him to be a good and honourable man, but she wants, at least in the sexual sense, to have Ted, the farmer. It is easy to criticise Marian, but she is in fact another commodity to her family, something to be traded on at a profit, that of social advancement. Hartley is too fine a novelist to make any character in this novel either good, or especially bad; he shows human nature as it is, in all its stages of conflicting emotions, complex needs, and ruthlessness. Leo is blatantly used by Marian and Ted for their own ends, in the looming shadow of Marian’s impending engagement and marriage. At the end of the novel, they are discovered in flagrante by Mrs. Maudsley and Leo. Mrs. Maudsley’s screams of shock, anger and the realisation that this might affect her daughter’s prospects, terrify Leo as he watches the act of love for the first time, on the ground right in front of him. From that moment, he is destroyed. Not only Leo,  but Ted himself is destroyed, who knowing he will lose the woman he loves and the lands he is farming, takes up his gun and shoots himself. Marian marries Hugh, and he brings up Ted’s child, but Marion deals with life after her marriage by fabricating the delusion that her relationship with Ted was pure and right. Empty, broken Leo can only see the legacy of her selfishness in the shape of her grandson, afraid himself to marry, wanting to love but being unable to. He is constrained by the knowledge of the family history, and his own fear of devastating hurt that may blight his life. He feels cursed, and the older Marian exhorts the older Leo to go and persuade him to get married, which Leo, her servant to the end, undertakes to do  This final errand occurs many years after World War I has taken the lives of her brothers and of Hugh himself; a conflict which cursed the 20^th century, resulting in a second world war, the use of an atomic bomb, and arguably, the destruction of psychological health.

 

The novel abounds with symbolism, class issues (very real in the plot) and is finely, thoughtfully structured, in the very best story-telling tradition that Hartley was heir to. It absolutely lacks, as it should, the novelist’s own ego, slapdash writing, wonky plotting and the preoccupation with cliff-edge titillation that characterises so many modern novels. It has autobiographical elements of the life of Hartley himself, but it is not an autobiography first and foremost. It testifies to his natural gifts as a writer. He won in recognition of these gifts one of the highest prizes awarded to a work of literature, the Heineman Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of Literature in 1954.  You may have seen the film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and atmospheric music by Michel LeGrand. It's excellent, faithful to the text, but nothing in it moves the reader as much as the experience of reading the novel; it really does deserve close consideration.