The Go-Between

"The Go-Between is about a child, Leo Colston, who goes to stay with a family. He ends up being used by adults to run errands: he’s taking letters between a couple, Marianne and Ted, who are having an illicit affair, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just so innocent, and then he experiences the sheer shock of suddenly realising what’s been going on and the huge amount of adult recrimination that comes with it. Yes. In A History of Insects it’s contemporaneous and in The Go-Between he’s looking back. But, although Leo Colston is relating it in retrospect, he’s also relating it as he saw it at the time. So yes, he’s got the knowledge now to understand what it was he was doing but he does take us into a world, and a very innocent world, at the end of the last century, where the children are quite benignly ignored. I think we all forget that air of bafflement from childhood: we remember loads of things about childhood – we all remember innocence. I think what we tend to forget is bafflement. I think it’s a mixture of both; I mean, bafflement is innocence: that state in which you simply haven’t a clue, and, of course, once it’s lost it’s lost for ever. Once you’ve understood what the real world is about, and what is going on in adult life, and that grownups aren’t gods, they’re actually human beings with the normal quota of faults and foibles … once you’ve got to that stage you can never ever go back. You could go back and play childish games or go back to childish pursuits, but you can never return to the state of innocence. I think that quite a few authors look back on that with nostalgia whether they realise it or not, almost wishing they could recreate innocence. I think L P Hartley never produced anything like as good as The Go-Between again."

"It’s a coming-of-age story set just before the First World War , in that golden age that we go back to almost obsessively in this country, the moment just before everything changed. But the seeds of that change had already been planted—it was not a golden age. This is something that I really have tried to explore in my fiction, especially in All Among the Barley , this pull that we have towards nostalgia, this idea that everything was perfect not long ago, almost within living memory, then it all went wrong. It’s a deeply damaging idea, because it says that all the changes that have happened since have ruined our idea of England and who we are. And what does that mean for people who have come here in those years since? And also, what does it mean for people who were never part of that ideal, which was very southeastern? It was white, it was wealthy, it was Anglican. It doesn’t even include all England, that ideal, let alone anything else. It’s quite a harmful vision that we keep being drawn back to. The Go-Between is set in summer. Summer is used by novelists a lot, to create a pressure cooker atmosphere—it gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and everyone’s waiting for the weather to break. This really is the central text for that, to me, that idea of things being stifling, being airless and dry, and having that sense that it’s got to break. It’s got to break, and you want it to, but you’re frightened too, which is kind of the end of childhood, isn’t it? You’re desperate to grow up, go on to the next bit, but you’re terrified as well. Hartley conjures that up so well. Yes. And he shows that it’s corrupt as well. He’s not doing a Downton Abbey , by any means."