The Go-Between (New York Review Books Classics)
by L. P. Hartley, L.P. Hartley
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Book Summary Information
Author: L. P. Hartley, L.P. HartleyIntroduction: Colm Toibin
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-03-12
ISBN: 0940322994
Number of pages: 401
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Book Reviews of The Go-Between (New York Review Books Classics)
Book Review: Three cheers for "quiet" writing, simple plot, and beautiful sentences
Summary: 5 Stars
What a shame it would be for humanity to forget how to read narrative fiction like this.
If possible, read this novel before you see the 1970 film version starring Julie Christie as Marian Maudsley, and Alan Bates as Ted Burgess. The now classic movie is unforgettable and will color your perceptions and expectations of the novel. Nonetheless, the novel does what the film cannot: Hartley gives us the fine detail of the development of a boy's moral discernment, his awareness that major questions don't always have clear answers.
The story line is simple enough. A precocious 12-year-old school boy, Leo Colston, gets the incredible opportunity to spend summer vacation at the home of a fellow student, Marcus. The residence just happens to be a large manor house in the steamy Norfolk, England, countryside. There Leo comes under the spell of his friend's much older sister; she is engaged to be married to the 9th Viscount Trimingham while she is still maintaining a passionate love affair with a local farmer, a man of a much lower social status. Leo carries rendezvous messages between Marian and Ted until Leo's increasing reluctance becomes unbearable. Leo's developing consciousness--as well as Marian's mother's suspicions--force the affair into the open.
The continuing success of this novel is due to the engaging quality of the boy's personality, the progression of his boy-like but serious love of Marian (as he nears his 13th birthday that summer), his admiration for Ted, and his respect for the young Lord Trimingham. The key to the believability of the plot is the affection between Leo and Marian: "My sister is very beautiful," Marcus said to me one day. He announced it quite impersonally . . . and I received it in the same spirit," Hartley writes, "but when I saw her next I studied her in the light of Marcus's announcement" (50). In carefully crafted senses, Hartley maps out Leo's emotional education: "So that is what it is to be beautiful, I thought, and for a time my idea of her as a person was confused and even eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented." Marian enables Leo to see and feel new things; at the manor house, she is the adult who is able to connect with the serious young man in the boy Leo. Marian takes Leo shopping in the cathedral city, Norwich: "My spiritual transformation took place in Norwich: it was there that, like an emerging butterfly, I was first conscious of my wings" (63-64). Later, Leo's sense of betrayal is easy to understand, but there's more to it than that; one must read the entire novel.
The Prologue and Epilogue are like bookend chapters, but also absolutely necessary to the craft of this novel; the narrator, Leo, as an older man, shows us the intersection of human psychology, and the background of tragedy that was The Boer War and World War I. Both these sections are exquisitely written, nuanced illustrations of human feeling and philosophical discernment. Also, this is a novel of place: the waterways, flat farmlands and fields of the Norfolk, East Anglia, countryside are the canvas upon which the characters act.
Summary of The Go-Between (New York Review Books Classics)
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece?a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart. This volume includes, for the first time ever in North America, Hartley's own introduction to the novel.
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