Reviews with content warning for Suicide - The Go-Between

What to say about this delicately-written novel about a turn of the century moment like no other. Of course all I could think when I finished reading was ‘damn, these social norms got hands!!!!’

This reminded me in many ways of Atonement and even more so of Howard’s End for obvious reasons and was a good look into the social norms and shifts that were occurring or beginning to occur in 1900, the near-end to the Victorian Age and beginning of the revolution and war of the 20th century. I’m not nearly well-educated enough in this era to really get into the nitty gritty but I don’t think anyone born around the millennium needs to explicate much on how it feels to be at a turning point in history.

'But they weren't out fault - they were the fault of this hideous century we live in, which has denatured humanity and planted death and hate where love and living were.'

This book is all of that turmoil shrunken down into the eyes of Leo as he navigates class and gender and the realities of the world he’s growing into and it was honestly a really fascinating read. Watching him trying to understand the adults and the reality around him and so often just not understanding was a gut-wrenching way into a highly complex world. What starts as the retrospective recounting of a young English schoolboy becoming obsessed with the zodiac and his perceived ability to malevolently curse bullies quickly becomes an acutely written window into class function in the UK. I was not surprised to see crystal clear echoes of that past in present-day Britain.

'It had never struck me that besides the damage one could see there might be other damage that one couldn't.'

Brandham Hall and the surrounding village is a microcosm of a so-called green and pleasant England and the characters in the book really are just actors on a stage enacting how class functions in this country. Even the way in which a little kid like Leo describes Ted with such casual disdain that he sees no issue with is very telling. Super wish that

Ted didn’t have to fucking DIE tho

and tbh it felt like I really did have the rug pulled out from under me but I suppose that was the point. These characters were desperately trying to uphold the social frameworks that were at the same time literally killing them and didn’t even seem to know why they did it.

'Was there a telephone here in your day?'
'No,' I replied. 'It might have made a great difference if there had been.'

Of course this has to be read with a rather large pinch of salt given that the main character is a white male and that the book is written by a while male and is all about the terrible problems of the too-rich upper classes but with all that in mind it still has obvious merit!

The first line ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ is a fantastic way to start the novel. In addition I love the insult ‘hard cheese’ and think we should bring it back instead of saying ‘tough shit’.

Four stars!

Content Warnings

chalkletters's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I first encountered The Go-Between on a list of great first lines given to my English class as writing prompts. From then on, I always kept it vaguely on my massive list of books I wanted to read some day, despite having no real idea what it was about or even what kind of book it was. (Interestingly, I made no such resolution about The Trial or 1984, nor can I even remember what the other books might have been.) I didn’t actually get around to reading The Go-Between until years later, which is probably for the best, as I don’t think I’d have understood it.

When I finally did read it, it was because I was on holiday in Norfolk and wanted to read something set in the surrounding area. The Go-Betweencertainly delivered on a sense of place and time, both during that read and this. There’s a slight metafictional flair in Leo looking back on his memories, which I always enjoy. It was interesting that Leo’s obsession with the soaring mercury matched so well with my own increasing temperatures as I suffered through a nasty febrile cold. Just one of the many ways that books seem to be reflecting my own life back at me this year!

Though the story wasn’t as compelling this time around, the prose is beautiful. The Go-Between is the kind of book that I think Rebecca would like because she appreciates a really stunning sentence. That’s not really something that I read for, but I do my best to notice them when I stumble across them.

Leo and the rest of the characters are very well-drawn, to the point that Leo is uncomfortably embarrassing at times. L P Hartley does a very good job of conveying adult characters through the perspective of a child who doesn’t really understand them, which is quite a tricky feat of writing.

The first time I finished The Go-Between, I was eager to read it again, feeling that there were many more layers which would offer up their secrets now that I knew the whole story. This time, I don’t feel quite that same drive — perhaps because I didn’t get as much additional understanding out of it as I had hoped. Still, I’ll keep it on my shelf. It’ll be interesting to revisit it again and see what I make of it a third time.

Content Warnings

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