I’ve decided to give up on P D James, author of the Book Club’s September (Death in Holy Orders) and October (Devices and Desires) choices, for the time being. I have no doubt about the quality of the writing. I found myself re-reading certain paragraphs as if they were prose poems enjoying the images they produced but I still had no empathy for Adam Dalgliesh or any of the books’ characters. I did try.
So I moved on swiftly to this month’s Book Club Choice The Go Between by L P Hartley. I first read this book about thirty years ago, appropriately during the hot summer of 1976 when I was working temporarily in Norfolk. I’m sure I bought a paperback with a scene from the 1971 Joseph Losey film on the front but it has disappeared. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the new edition I bought from Jarrold in Norwich has an interesting introduction to the book and to L P Hartley’s life.
The story begins with Leo, an aging man, looking back at his childhood and in particular the hot summer of 1900 which he had spent at Brandham Hall, the Norfolk home of his boarding school friend Marcus. Here the young Leo acts as a messenger between Marian the daughter of a wealthy land owning family and Ted Burgess a local tenant farmer. Leo is at first ignorant of the true nature of their relationship. His actions in intercepting and occasionally editing the messages have disastrous consequences and leave him with a psychological scar which he carries through his life.
I re-read the book very quickly and it brought flooding back my own memories of my own long hot summer in Norfolk. I also watched a copy of the wonderful Joseph Losey film of the book and was reminded of drinking Abbots Ale in the interesting open courtyard at the Maids Head Hotel which has now sadly been enclosed. Norwich seems so different from the city I knew only thirty years ago. As Hartley says at the beginning of The Go Between ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’.
I recently heard on the radio Hanif Kureishi say that the less that he knows about an author’s life the better, preferring to appreciate the immediacy of a piece of writing. The Go Between was inspired by a holiday Hartley spent as a child at Bradenham Hall near Swaffham, a house rented by the family of a boarding school friend from the Rider Haggards in 1908. I think I have mentioned before that I often find an author’s own life as interesting and sometimes even more interesting than their writing. So with this in mind I borrowed from the Millenium Library in Norwich a copy of a Foreign Country: The Life of L P Hartley written several years ago by local author Adrian Wright. I was taken aback by how autobiographical The Go Between is and fascinated by the fact that some event may have taken place during Hartley’s stay at Bradenham Hall which affected the rest of his own life. I’m glad I didn’t read the biography before I re-read the book because I think my reading would have been spoiled by an overwhelming feeling of sorrow for the author. He seems to have been a very sad and lonely man who spent much of his life trapped between the past and the present.
I just loved this book and there are very few books which I can say that about. If there was to be a competition for an iconic piece of Norfolk fiction this would win hands down. I think when Hartley visited Norfolk as a young boy he must have soaked up like a sponge everything he experienced and been fascinated, wide eyed by it all. He must have fallen in love like I’ve fallen in love with the Norfolk countryside – it’s history and nature and I think he must also have fallen in love with someone he met. A young boy’s crush which stayed with him all his life. Something amazing obviously happened which led to the creation of this wonderful book. I’m in two minds whether I should find out more about his time in Norfolk. I don’t want it to spoil the pure essence of his experience which pours out slowly from this book.
I’ve tried reading one of his other books Eustace and Hilda but it is just so boringly dense maybe reflecting the sort of life he was leading in his middle age. Art reflecting life maybe. I would recommend The Go Between to anyone who wants to understand why Norfolk is such a wonderful place to live.
By the way anyone else out there??
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