A review by michaelontheplanet
The Go-between by L.P. Hartley

4.0

To serve them all my gays: superior school holiday adventures among the landed gentry of East Anglia, when boarding schoolboy Leo stays with his friend’s people and ends up as message-bearer for an illicit love affair between the farm hand and the aristocrat’s fiancée. Proust meets Jennings with a bit of DH Lollipop flung in for good measure. Hartley is superb at capturing the fevered goings-on of the pubescent boy’s mind - fear of not fitting in, looking odd, being thought a sissy. Just as one of the schoolmasters in Buckeridge’s Linbury Court is perplexed by the workings of the young mind - “the things boys said and the things boys did seemed incredible to a grown up of his way of thinking”, so Hartley is pretty clear: the over-thinking of an active imagination coupled with a half-understanding of adult mores proves fatal. But what The Go-Between is really noteworthy for is exposing just how much the uppers despise the likes of us, the ordinary people, who smell and talk different - part of a long lineage of rich people’s disdain that stretches from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Jacob Rees Mogg referring to them as “stains”. Unless of course, rather like poor old Marian, they just happen to find them hot. A pot very effectively boiled with hypocrisy, snobbery and deception, and a fitting epitaph for the age of the old queen.