Will I love The Go-Between?

I’ve always loved this book and have paid homage to it by naming the local aristocrat in my novel Lord Hartley.

The book is set in 1900, and adolescent schoolboy Leo spends the long, hot summer with his wealthy schoolfriend Marcus at Brandham Hall, Norfolk. The boy copes with agonising class differences, lost innocence, and eventual breakdown. He is undone in his role as messenger for the daughter of the house, who is having a steamy affair with the tenant farmer next door.

The book was turned into a film, set at Melton Constable Hall (my model for Swan Hall… show more.

This book is set in the scorching hot summer of 1900, often noted by young people of the time as a moment of hope, peace, and infinite possibility. They didn’t know what was coming for them. Neither does Hartley’s narrator, a fatherless 12-year-old boy spending his summer holiday with the wealthy family of a school friend.

I loved the imagery in the book: a stolen afternoon of coed swimming in a sky-blue river; a village cricket game that exposes both class tension and a forbidden romance; a green summer suit with smoked-pearl buttons that makes a boy suddenly conscious of… show more.

I read this book for the second time in thirty-five years and have seen the original film based on it at least three times. The novel does a great job of portraying the situation of a boy visiting the country estate of a classmate whose family is in a higher social class.

The book has a successful narrative design of frame narration and first-person narrator. It achieves a great portrayal of human motivations and the lasting effects that self-serving people have on the people they impress.

As with The Portrait of a Lady, I wanted to re-read a novel to… show more.

The Go-Between is a haunting, doom-laden book about a naïve boy – Leo – out of his depth when staying with a socially smarter friend in a British country house. It’s set in the heatwave summer of 1911 and made such a big impression on me that I wrote a novel of my own set in that summer. The first line of The Go-Between is famous: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Cue the dissolve into an Edwardian dreamworld that slowly turns nightmarish.