Leo is desperate to break the couple apart. He slightly changes a message Ted sends to Marian and even tries to create a magical potion to split them up. Mrs. Maudsley, Marcus and Marian's mother, has become suspicious of Marian's disappearances. She has recently been unwell as she has been so worried that Marian will break off her engagement with Trimingham. The past is a foreign country” has finally become part of my present. I’ve just read LP Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between for the first time, a book everyone else my age read at least 45 years ago. I’d seen the film and that seemed to be enough. And then, a few weeks ago, I came across a seductive Penguin edition in a secondhand bookshop in Edinburgh and became curious to find out what I’d been missing. Our narrator, Leo, recalls the year 1900 vividly - capturing with precise detail the country manners of both the upper and lower British class. Leo himself is not well-to-do but he is friends with a boy who is; he has been invited to spend a few days with his friend (and family). Soon after his arrival, Leo draws the particular attention of his friend's sister. Since Marian is somewhat angelic in appearance and nature, Leo becomes smitten in the way a young boy can. But eventually Marian makes a request of Leo - an innocent one ...which gradually becomes less innocent - even to someone as naive as Leo. I am a cynical bitch. I don’t read this romantic genre often - but wait - it isn’t really “romantic” in the sense of unbridled break from reality. No, this is powerful emotion grounded in harsh reality. This book moved me deeply. It’s got all the feels and it is extraordinarily beautifully written. If you want a bit of nostalgia for lost innocence and days gone by, this is spot on. Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me."

If you enjoyed The Go-Between, you might like Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. This is a very evocative novel, which really encapsulates the past well. We begin with Leo’s story at school, where he is bullied and his life made a misery, before somehow a chance event causes him to become something of a hero. This experience gives him a certain confidence, so he is thrilled to visit Marcus in the holidays. There is even a titled guest; a Viscount, who allows him to call him by his first name, as well as the lovely Marian, Marcus’s sister. It is evocative and sensual like nothing else I've read. It makes nostalgia seem religious and sexual desire seem pure. As a complete aside, one of the greatest annoyances was the repeated trope of mispronouncing the name Hugh. A constant play on Hugh/you, which first time was charming; by the fifth or sixth time I wanted to step into the story and slap him silly, or into oblivion.The Go-Between also explores the relationship between class and sexuality. Marian is a wealthy upper-class woman and Ted is a tenant farmer. Having a relationship with a woman above his social class has disastrous consequences for Ted. And middle-class Leo with his regional accent becomes collateral damage also.

Hartley shows how deep Marian and Ted's love is by the fact that they continue their affair despite Marian's engagement. Their deep love is most extremely emphasised by Ted's taking of his own life. This is traumatising for all involved. It could be that Ted believed this late Victorian world would never allow him and Marian to be together and, therefore, he did not want to live. Indeed, before he was exiled from Paradise, the young boy was putting down in his diary some very thoughtful lines about ethics and religion and politics (the Boer War in that period). As a piece of television, the casting for the 1950s characters (Broadbent and Redgrave) seems perhaps indulgent given how little time they have on screen, though Redgrave is perfect and even has a more than passing resemblance to Vanderham. I was in Vienna on holiday last week, browsing for German reads or translations from languages other than English. Out of nowhere one of the employees slipped this book onto my pile. “This publisher only releases books that have moved the owner”. I saw it was a translation from English, but shrugged and bought it nonetheless.Not long after, Marcus informs Leo that Marian is now engaged to Lord Trimingham. Leo is relieved and believes this means Marian and Ted's letters will now stop. This does not come to pass and Marian again asks Leo to take a letter to Ted. This upsets Leo greatly but he ends up acting as the couple's messenger once again.

This is one of the most perfect novels ever written. It has many layers and levels, thanks to its brilliant narrative structure of an old man recollecting a tragic love story he witnessed in intense close up as a young boy. It is a rare case of a complex narrative structure actually being necessary for the proper exposition of the plot. For the story is not just about what happened when the narrator was a boy, but how it changed his life as a man and how, towards the end of his life, writing about it changed him again. In the book's prologue, Leo Colston chances upon a diary from 1900, the year of his thirteenth birthday, and gradually pieces together a memory that he has suppressed. Under its influence, and from the viewpoint of what he has become by the midpoint of "this hideous century", Leo relives the events of what had once seemed to him its hopeful beginning. The importance of his boarding school's social rules is another theme running through the book and complicates Leo's interaction with the adult world. Do you remember what that summer was like? how much more beautiful than any since? Well, what was the most beautiful thing in it? Wasn't it us, and our feelings for each other? [...] We did have sorrows, bitter sorrows, but they weren't our fault – they were the fault of this hideous century we live in, which has denaturated humanity and planted death and hate where love and living were. [...] Tell him there's no spell or curse except an unloving heart. I was a conformist: it never occurred to me that because I suffered, there was something wrong with the system, or with the human heart. Mercury is the god of communication, the god of thieves, the god of artists, the god of the conduit between living souls and dead souls. This novel, a revelation of the tragedy of hypocrisy and the workings of power, of the human need for "calumny" to be "more colourful than it is", also communicates images of a magnetism so strong that "with its strength went a suggestion of beauty and mystery that took hold of my imagination in spite of all my prejudice". It is full of images of rebirth, the most astonishing of which is the final image of the much older Leo literally revisiting his past and coming away again with yet one more romantic errand to run. The real revelation is of something which soars above social hierarchy and even the 20th-century abyss. It is both subtle and crass: a modern kind of sublime.

Secrets are like glue. They bond their keepers. It's hard not to admire their power. At first, secrets gleam and are dexterous as young gymnasts. The problem comes as time goes on. Their weight changes. Their shape, too. They lose their grip. There's a crash. The shards they leave are us on the ground staring up at the bar from which we fell. Leo eventually opens one of the letters and discovers that it is a love letter. Marian and Ted are having an affair that they must keep a secret because of their different classes. Leo is now uncomfortable acting as their messenger. He attempts to get out of it but is unable to. On 8 July 2012, an adaptation by Frances Byrnes and directed by Matt Thompson was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. The production was re-broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 26 May 2013. [18] Opera [ edit ] The young Leo is a naive and innocent boy living in the late Victorian period. He is asked to spend the summer on the estate of his wealthy friend, Marcus Maudsley. Marcus and Leo met in school and became close when the naive Leo claimed to have magical powers. Leo is from a lower-class family but his mother encourages him to go and stay with Marcus's family in Brandham Hall for the summer. The direction of Pete Travis is spot on and, if you missed this when it was broadcast, it is still available on BBC iPlayer.

Class mattered to him a great deal, and in the end, was the sin that unravelled the lives of so many. It mattered to him that boundaries should not be crossed, even though he was the first transgressor of those boundaries. By natural extension, then, he had no right to enjoy the patronage of his social superiors when he could not return the courtesy to his social inferiors. And that's the great fault in the novel: while enjoying the hospitality and benefaction of his friend's family, he turns his own narrow-mindedness against someone who had not done him any harm; to compound the sin, he somehow manages to put the blame on others. It was the time of The Boer War. Much would happen in the fifty years from the time our narrator 'put down' his pen and when, in the Epilogue, he took it up again. Whose fault was it? All the sorrows -- the bitter sorrows? All the deaths? What we do to each other? Un relato muy inglés, donde los sentimientos solo se intuyen. La prosa, elegante, de cuello duro, sí, pero eficaz. Clásica en su estructura y en su estilo, nos cuenta una historia de amor clásico, con una carga simbólica clásica (su mercurio, el mensajero de los dioses, o esa bella-dona venenosa que quiere buscar el pan y la sal más allá de su terruño) y con tragedia final clásica y romántica.

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The themes are interesting: a child's incomprehension of adult behavior and ambiguous speech, love, death and deception. It is about the simultaneous process of losing the naivety of a child and the abrupt awakening to the deceptions of adulthood. It draws a rather negative view of British upper crust values and mode of life. I find the consequences of the events as they are drawn in the story to be exaggerated. Douglas MacLean, “Between desire and destruction”, in Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction, Oxford University 2014, [1]