“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It’s with these opening words (some of the most famous in English literature) that we first meet Leo Colston, the narrator of L P Hartley’s most well-known work of fiction, The Go-Between. It’s the early 1950s and Leo has just discovered a diary that he’d kept as a schoolboy in the summer of 1900 when he was about to turn 13. As he reads the pages, he finds himself plunging into memories that he’d kept at bay for well over half a century and through the course of two world wars.
What happened that summer was to mark Leo for life, upending closely held beliefs about the order of things and inducting him into the messy world of adult relationships and desire and erasing his innocence.
That innocence is apparent from the first pages of the diary that are communicated to us through the adult Leo. He was bullied at school when he wrote in his diary that the school cricket team had vanquished their rivals and showed the entry to his schoolmates. They respond to this description by assaulting him and demanding “Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?” Believing in the Zodiac and black magic, he writes down a couple of curses and two of the bullies suffer an accident. From thereon, Leo is convinced he is a master of language and harbours writerly ambitions.
In the summer break, the mother of his well-off, upper-class friend Marcus invites Leo to spend the holidays in the Maudsley family’s country mansion, Brandham Hall. His mother is not keen that Leo go to Norfolk, saying that she will miss his being at home with her. (Leo’s father had died the previous year). But Leo persuades her to let him go.
At Brandham Hall, Leo, who could be priggish and a bit too in awe of the English class system, realises that he’s a figure of fun for the rest of the house party. He’s brought the wrong clothes for a summer visit (in his naïveté, he’s wearing a Norfolk jacket since he’s in Norfolk) and the only person who shows concern for his well-being is Marcus’s older sister, Marian.
Marian makes an indelible impression on the young Leo. Startled by her blue eyes, he thinks: “So that is what it is to be beautiful…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 and Leo become friends, and soon enough, he’s acting as a go-between, a messenger carrying notes between her and the local farmer, Ted. She is also due to be engaged to the local Viscount, a disfigured veteran of the Boer War. In his all-encompassing innocence and belief that someone as beautiful and beguiling as Marian could commit no sin, Leo doesn’t quite understand the larger game he’s part of or the class conflicts and sexual transgressions that he’s facilitating through his actions.
When awareness slowly dawns, Leo tries to get out of the web of deceit that he’s unwittingly become part of, but cruelly, circumstances draw him in further and the inability of the adults around him to consider his youth and protect him ensures he grows up well before he should.
In the epilogue, Leo goes back to Norfolk to trace the fates of all those who played a vital role in the incidents of that long-ago summer. The family has suffered their fair share of tragedies and Marian is still there, older and as self-deluded as ever. And on her pleading, Leo does one last favour to the woman he’d cared for more deeply than she deserved.
The Go-Between is a brutal excoriation of the hypocrisy of the English upper classes. The story may be set in another century but Hartley’s book underscores how it’s always the innocent that lose out when the privileged try to rewrite the rules of the social order they themselves have established.
The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.
That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.