Books on Monday: The Go-Between
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
So opens The Go-Between, a novel originally published in 1953. Every once in a while, I read a novel that I’ve heard about but not gotten round to, and it is so good, so well-done, so satisfying, so much the compleat English novel that I wince with painful embarrassment. How could I have been such a moron, not to read this book sooner? The Go-Between is one of those books.
The NYRB reprint (2002) sports a startling blurb by Ian McEwan:
The famous formulation about the past sets the tone: this is a strange and beautiful book. I first read it in my early teens, and its atmosphere for yearning for lost times and of childish innocence challenged has haunted me ever since.
That’s got to be the literary understatement of the decade. Mr McEwan had just published Atonement, an obvious hommage to Hartley’s novel.