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

THE LAST REMAINS by Elly Griffiths, reviewed by Adèle Geras

"If you have never read these books, then start right now ..."

Adèle Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which (under the pseudonym Hope Adams) is Dangerous Women, published by Michael Joseph. She lives in Cambridge.

One of the best presents I was given for my birthday this year was a copy of Elly Griffiths' latest Dr Ruth Galloway mystery. My friend Wendy Cope gave it to me ... we've been reading about Ruth and her companions alongside one another since The Crossing Places, which was the book that launched the series in 2009. For sixteen years, at the rate of almost a book a year, we've lived with Ruth and followed her life and her adventures. We've got to know her lover, Harry Nelson, a married policeman who heads a team of men and women who are all fully rounded characters. If you love the Ruth Galloway books, you belong to a kind of gang.

Appropriately, a book called The Last Remains is the final book about this particular detective and her friends. I was therefore almost bereft when I came to the end of the story. I live in hope that some years further down the line, there will be a case which brings everyone back one more time ....but till then, Elly Griffiths has created a glorious collection of stories about one of the most likeable of detectives.

From the start, Ruth was more like a normal person than most detectives. She was, for one thing, not thin. She describes herself as needing to lose weight, though this aspect, which made me warm to her, is less important as the books go on. Throughout the series, her relationship with Harry Nelson is the spine that holds the narrative together, gives it an emotional core absent from many other books, and provides a continuity that makes Griffiths' fans go back again and again to see how those two are getting on. I know Elly a little and every time I meet her I beg her to make things end well for our hero and heroine. I'm saying nothing about what happens. You will have to read the book. Of course the fact that the top policeman has a distinguished archaeologist to help him, makes the answers to the mysteries much more interesting. Their adventures take them in all kinds of unexpected directions, and there's a thread of magic, worlds beyond our own, the slightly supernatural which runs through the books. Cathbad, Ruth's friend who is a Druid, carries most of the weight of these themes in the novels and he's one of her most attractive creations. Mystery surrounds him even in the midst of the most prosaic situations.

Because we've lived with these characters for so long, we have followed a great many stories through recent history. Cathbad almost died of Covid. Ruth has a daughter with Nelson, and we watch Kate grow into a young person who reflects well on the way her mother has brought her up. Nelson's family also help in Kate's development and are present in her life. A situation which could have become very fraught has always (even through many ups and downs, some of them very dramatic) been managed in a way that's both civilised and plausible.

The stories are set in Norfolk and bring that county most beautifully to life. Ruth lives in one of three cottages on a salt marsh and we are always made aware of what every location looks like. Griffiths never over -describes, but can paint a scene in very few sentences so that we feel we are there. Her dialogue is pitch perfect. It never sounds artificial, but as though real people are talking. She's very good at animals and I have grown especially fond of Ruth's cat Flint. Cathbad's dog (called Thing) is a bull terrier of impeccable character but I have to confess to being one of those people who have a 'thing' about that breed. My bad. Thing is totally lovely in every respect.

In The Last Remains, the body of a young woman is found behind the boarded-up wall of what used to be a café back in the day. Suspicion falls on a group of students and their charismatic and creepy tutor who used to frequent the café long ago. Cathbad, who was then called Michael Malone, was one of their number. What does he know? How involved was he? When he goes missing, there's a possibility that he may have something to hide. Alongside all this, Ruth's University is about to axe the Department of Archaeology. A colleague of hers has something surprising to tell her. Nelson's wife, Michelle, who had been living apart from her husband, has returned to Norfolk. There's an awful lot going on and it's miraculous that Griffiths manages to keep all the balls in the air so brilliantly. Also, there's a reference in this novel to events that happened in the other books, so that you're reminded as you read of all that you've read before. The solution is elegant with a really poignant and unexpected revelation towards the end of the book.

I will now go and catch up with other novels by Griffiths that I haven't read yet. And yes, she has written many other novels. She's one of the most prolific writers of mysteries at work today.

Goodbye, Ruth and co. Reading about you for all these years was a real treat and I hope that one day, you might return. I want to see what Kate becomes. I want to see Ruth and Nelson as grandparents. I want more....

If you have never read these books, then start right now. You won't regret it.

The Last Remains is published by Quercus.

See also Elly Griffiths' The Postscript Murders, reviewed by Rachel Ward.  

Lockdown Sunday extra: NATURE CURE by Richard Mabey

"In these days of coronavirus lockdown and climate emergency, the finding of solace in the natural world is ever more significant."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers and is currently working on a new adult novel.

A version of this review first appeared on Normblog in 2006 as part of a Writer's Choice feature hosted by the late Professor Norman Geras.

A chance hearing of Radio 4’s Book of the Week first alerted me to this wise and compelling account of Mabey’s decline into depression, and re-emergence. This was in 2005, but in these days of coronavirus lockdown and climate emergency, the finding of solace in the natural world is ever more significant for those of us lucky enough to have gardens, parks or countryside at hand.

Mabey’s book strikes many chords with me, from page 2 where he describes the finding of a grounded swift. I had the same rare experience when one of my cats somehow caught one and brought it indoors through the cat-flap. Handling the bewildered but unharmed bird, I saw the perfection of its aeronautical design – strong, swept-back wings, wide gape, tough eyelids with bristly lashes. Like Mabey, I realised that the only way to return it to the air was to launch it like a paper aeroplane, and watched in amazed delight as it skimmed the grass before soaring high to rejoin the flock. (NOTE: since writing this piece I have learned that this isn't advisable as it could risk injuring the bird. Better to see if there's a wild bird sanctuary near you that can examine and release the swift.)

Swifts, epitomising English summer with their screaming flight, hold a special significance for Mabey, echoing Ted Hughes for whom their return each May proved that “the globe’s still working”. So it was a sure sign of the depression he’d sunk into that he lay in bed too lethargic to turn his head while the swifts whizzed and shrieked outside his window. Many writers will recognise the odd, bereft feeling of completing a book. For Mabey the work had been a massive one, Flora Britannica*, and the sense of loss was compounded by the death of his mother from Parkinson’s disease, through which he and his sister had shared the nursing.

His home for most of his life had been in his parents’ house in the Chilterns. There, he owned a piece of woodland, from which he banned the local hunt (hurrah!) while encouraging neighbours to wander and collect wood. Debilitated and purposeless in his illness, he was encouraged by friends – and a new lover - to resume his absorption in the natural world and in writing, the twin passions which had always sustained him. Acknowledging that he’d never really “fledged”, and that the process of maturation demanded a move, he decamped with three cats to the Norfolk Breckland, as lodgers in an isolated seventeenth-century farmhouse. Here, through a solitary but cathartic winter, he finds new bearings and rediscovers his connection with the land. He examines maps, he ponders over interesting names, he reflects on the shaping of the landscape by human intervention and the enclosure of the commons, he becomes fascinated by “westing” – what seems an instinctive alignment of buildings and field boundaries towards the setting sun.

This isn’t only the story, though, of Mabey’s illness and recovery. There are frequent digressions – into the effects of the Enclosures Act on Norfolk life and landscape, glaciation and land-forms, language and folklore, flora and fauna. The Northamptonshire poet John Clare, like the swifts, is present throughout. Mabey feels a strong affinity with Clare, “ecological minstrel”, not only because of Clare’s mental illness and shared habitats, including the same Northampton hospital, but for Clare’s deep empathy with wild creatures and his skill in capturing their “jizz” (the concise term used by birdwatchers).

He found little solace in mainstream environmentalism, seeing it as merely utilitarian, "based on enlightened self-interest: we want a healthy, unpolluted, species-rich ecosystem because our material future depends on it,” while we assume “the right, or the duty, to determine every other species’ share, too.” (Has he seen a change, I wonder, since publication of this book in 2005? Extinction Rebellion, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace value the planet and its ecosystems for themselves, not solely for the benefits they bring to us. According to the organisation EcocideLaw, drawing on the work of the late Polly Higgins, "Ecocide is a crime against the Earth itself, not just against humans.")

Mabey sees our connection to the natural world as essential to our spiritual and physical well-being. In the worst slumps of depression, he had become, like the grounded swift, “the incomprehensible creature adrift in some insubstantial medium, out of kilter with the rest of creation. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but maybe that is the way our whole species is moving.” To read Nature Cure, at least, is to slow that progress. As well as the honesty of Mabey’s self-revelation and the range of his knowledge, it’s the quality of his prose – the Ruskin-like attentiveness to shifts of light, patterns of growth, and behaviour of even the most common bird - that makes this book so memorable.

Nature Cure is published by Vintage.

* Flora Britannica is another of my treasures, joined now by Birds Britannica (by Mark Crocker and Richard Mabey) which similarly combines natural history, folklore and anecdote.

See also The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The Outrun by Amy Liptrott, reviewed by Paula Knight

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Corduroy by Adrian Bell, reviewed by Andrew Fusek Peters

Wilding by Isabella Tree, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Natural Selection: a Year in the Garden by Dan Pearson, reviewed by Linda Newbery