It announced itself to Hartley when he was in Venice in May 1952, working on a completely different project he put it immediately aside and wrote The Go-Between quite fast, revising his draft as soon as October and November. Can a book ambush you? From the prologue ("Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?") to the epilogue ("Tell him there's no spell or curse except an unloving heart") it felt, as I reread, uncannily familiar, like something I knew – and had no idea I knew – by heart.Ī combination of knowing and not-knowing is this novel's driving force. I opened the same book again for the first time in three decades a couple of years ago. I first read his best-known novel, The Go-Between, at the age of 16 in 1979 (in a Penguin copy with Julie Christie under a parasol on the front, a still from Joseph Losey's 1970 film adaptation), because Hartley was the most contemporary writer on our Sixth Year Studies English course. Then I'll say the first half of its first line and the audience will come back loud and strong on their own with the second half.Ĭertainly Hartley and his multi-awardwinning work (his Eustace and Hilda trilogy, completed in 1947, was hugely acclaimed, and the film version of his 1957 novel, The Hireling, won the main award at Cannes in 1973) have all but disappeared from contemporary literary consciousness. Generally there's a single yes or a couple of yeses otherwise silence, a shaking of heads. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." For the past year or so, when I've been giving readings, I've asked the people in the audience if they know or remember LP Hartley's 1953 novel, The Go-Between.
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