The Go-Between: Doing Things Differently

���The past is a foreign country:  they do things differently there��� . These words must be one of the best opening lines in any novel since Dickens���s introductions to ���Bleak House��� (���LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln���s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill');  or ���A Tale of Two Cities��� (���It was the best of times. It was the worst of times������).

 

The book involved, which I think everyone should read, is ���The Go-Between��� by L.P. Hartley. Some of Hartley���s other books are interesting (The ���Eustace and Hilda��� trilogy especially) but ���The Go-Between��� is his masterpiece, and I have often had the feeling that I was somehow meant to read it. Shortly before I left my Cambridge boarding school, my eye was caught by a glimpse of the original Hamish Hamilton hardback, with its evocative picture of a boy (not much younger than my then age, 14 or perhaps 15) stealing away from a serene, porticoed English country house (you can see a picture of this cover at the book���s Wikipedia entry) . I immediately knew that I wished to read it, though I had never heard of it. When I went back later that day to try to borrow it, it was already out, and, in the hurly burly of the complex months which followed, I forgot all about it. This was probably a good thing. I would have been too young to see its point.

 

Five turbulent years later, I was at a loose end on a sunny early summer afternoon at the University of York. I had no work to do, no essay to write, no leaflets to distribute. So I rambled over to the pleasant, now-vanished little bookshop , Godfrey���s , which was then part of the University Library building. And the book which caught my eye was ���The Go-Between���, this time bearing a picture of the ravishing Julie Christie dressed as an Edwardian young lady,  in a still from a film of the book (not then released in Britain). I had to have it. It cost six shillings, perhaps the last time I ever paid for a book in shillings, which dates it to 1971, when old and new currencies still ran alongside each other.  This was a big chunk of the two pounds I used to take out every week for living expenses, the price of two dining hall meals. I was never truly short of money in those days, but my needs were modest and any extra could throw out the budget dramatically, which was good discipline.

 

Why is it so good? A lot of people seem to have seen the film but not read the book, thus in my missing about three-quarters of the point. The film is perfectly all right, and very faithful to the book in most ways. The music is particularly good, with a strong hint of menace mixed with a lush, seductive prettiness. The setting, at a real Norfolk mansion. Melton Constable Hall, whose own sad story is a separate drama of its own, is pretty much perfect, and the shots of Norwich and the Norfolk countryside make me yearn to return to that remote, motorway-free  and under-appreciated county (how I miss the superb dining cars on the Liverpool-Street to Norwich railway line, which disappeared a few years ago. They were among the last of their kind and almost worth going to Norwich for). As well as Miss Christie and Alan Bates , at that time permanently doomed to pay D.H. Lawrence-type peasant sex-bombs, it is crammed with actors of the kind who helped create the idea of mid-20th century Englishness, especially the endlessly watchable Michael Gough and the majestically beautiful Margaret Leighton, and of course Edward Fox, the master of aristocratic cockney, and born to play King Edward VIII, as he eventually did.   

 

But ��� like many films of books ��� it struggles to convey the writer���s actual voice. And, by intercutting the central character���s return to the scene 50 years later with the events of 1900, it probably confuses those who haven���t read the book.   

 

I will try to tell you why you should read it, without spoiling it for you. It is good about so many things : about the cruelty and strange tribal customs of small boys in private boarding schools, about the two most sensitive borders in the English class system , the first between the modest middle classes and the truly rich, and the second between the merely wealthy and the genuinely well-born; about the wild optimism of those who were young in 1900 and imagined that the new century would be the bringer of nothing but progress and loveliness ( as daft as those who harboured similar illusions about the turn of the calendar from 1999 to 2000, but more observably mistaken, given how much we knew about the 20th century).

 

It also has the wonderful theme of oppressive ever-increasing heat (expressed in proper Fahrenheit temperatures, which actually seem hot)  , only to be brought to an end by a great storm, which duly comes.  And, for me, the fascination felt by melancholics such as I am for the slightly scruffy back parts of noble buildings, where their true nature is revealed and where you can usually be left in peace by grown-ups or people anxious to make conversation when you prefer none - the servants��� stairs , the kitchen gardens and the half-abandoned outhouses . I once lived in a half an Edwardian house on the far outskirts of Chichester which had its own miniature gasworks and electricity plant, both by then derelict,  but enjoyably terrifying and fascinating, especially the gas apparatus with its deep pit and mysterious weights.  And one of my boarding schools occupied a modest but majestic gentleman���s house on a  Devon hilltop, whose stable blocks and estate workshops still partly survived, and where you could find all kinds of devices which would now be in a museum of rural life, still lying about as if the men who used them had gone to lunch and would soon be back.

 

All this appeals greatly, as does the cricket match in which otherwise- hidden conflicts of class , sex and money are played out in the open  (one of the best literary cricket matches, comparable with that in Dorothy Sayers���s ���Murder Must Advertise���, in which the murderer suddenly understands beyond all doubt that he is caught and doomed, and why).  And all of it begins with a sad middle-aged man in a bleak uncurtained attic, remembering the combination which unlocks an ancient diary, and wishing, as he finally recalls it, that he had not���

 

As one does with all the best novels, it is written so persuasively that one wonders all the time if it is in fact true, if these things actually happened. I still do.