Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE GO-BETWEEN by L P Hartley

 

"Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life ..."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

"I put a spell on you

Because you're mine ..." Nina Simone

"Once a go between never a go between." (The older Leo)

Towards the end of this outstanding novel, one of the principals, Marian, tells the narrator, Leo, returned to the village years after the book’s climactic end: ‘There are stuffy people, even in Norfolk’. I knew stuffy people in Norfolk. I arrived there immediately after the film of the book was shot but only now have I read it.

This novel tells a gripping story, a tense drama of sharply defined characters in another world, Hartley’s ‘foreign country’. Moreover, it’s not only the past that is a foreign country, so, too, is the present we enter as strangers. The language we use to explain the new experiences is tested, just as the shaping of the novel tests our sensibilities. The imagery is eloquent: Leo, the young boy invited by a school friend to the big house in the country, the wealthy, landed owners with their set ways and strict protocols of behaviour and dress, finds himself caught up in a bewildering game of intrigue, and stuffy manners, certain things that ‘are not done’ all strange to him. In soaring temperatures, the lad with a fixation about magic and making spells, through them hoping to manage circumstance otherwise beyond him to control, ironically is trussed up in a heavy Norfolk jacket. Add starched Eton collars – as stiff as the etiquette which governs his hosts, especially the horribly priggish Marcus, his school pal, and Hartley has cunningly outlined the central theme of Leo being used, as if he, too, were in a box, ready for wear, all analogous to the anxieties of the young boy which he never entirely shakes off.

At one point, Leo imagines himself proleptically, in conversation with his twelve year-old self: he’d been ‘flying too close to the sun’. Marian, whom he calls the Zodiac, a sort of immortal, object, could he but put a name to his bewitched feelings, of his helpless schoolboy crush, uses the pretext of a visit to Norwich to meet her paramour, a secret concealed until later in the story, to go to a shop to buy Leo a suit of lighter clothes. First lie. The summer suit, in Lincoln green, evokes Robin Hood the outlaw, flaunter of repressive rules and regime.

Leo explores the deserted outhouses of the Hall, where in the tangle of weeds, the boy addicted to spells and curses, totems of his desire for otherness and escape, discovers deadly nightshade, atropa belladonna, whose juice is poisonous if drunk but squeezed as drops into the eyes, enlarges the pupils, hence the ‘beautiful lady’. A perfect symbolism. Even the contrast between the orderliness and formality of the house and the wild tangle of the outhouses – where the terrible climax of the novel explodes – is telling, the areas of life under constant surveillance and the neglected places where secrets flourish and are, eventually, catastrophically exposed. Hartley weaves a compelling net of intrigue and a brilliant portrayal of the starchy customs of aristocratic life, and, like a deadly leitmotif, the messages carried between Marian and Ted the local farmer – Beauty and the Beast…? – by their postman, Leo, the bewildered newcomer sucked into their conspiracy and ignorant about this mysterious practice of ‘spooning’ about which Ted, cleaning the shotgun – ominous portent – remains tight-lipped.

One of Marcus’s favourite words is cads - ‘only cads eat their porridge sitting down’. And into this strait-laced world comes the boy whose widowed mother cleaves to him almost as tightly as the Norfolk jacket and Hartley brilliantly shows us this new world through the child’s eyes; Leo wonders at the behaviour of the adults: ‘their worlds are private, even their games are mysterious’. Marian herself, affianced to the Viscount, is trapped, like a fieldmouse taking refuge in a stook of newly harvested wheat, caught between the heat of desire and the prickle of hidebound, emotionally shorn reserve. After the trauma of what he experienced at the Hall, Leo is, as Marian later tells the older man, ‘all dried up inside’. By contrast, the love that she and Ted Burgess shared was a ‘beautiful thing’, they were made for each other but social convention forbade that. The excruciating moral pressure arising from this denial lay heavily on Leo and crushed him forever, that and the sticky web of lies into which he’d blundered, forced to intrude upon an alien adult world of disappointment and misprision. All masterfully delineated by Hartley.

At the end, I cried.

The Go-Between is published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Go-Between directed by Joseph Losey, 1971

The Go-Between directed by Pete Travis, 2015

More of Graeme's choices:

The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey

One Day by David Nicholls

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe