The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley

A writer looks back on an experience in early adolescence, during a spell at an English country house. The young woman who lives there is conducting an affair with a lower class local man, and the adolescent's naive misunderstanding of the situation results in a catastrophic intervention that begets irreversible and tragic consequences for all three individuals. So, Ian McEwan, now I know where the plot for Atonement came from.

To my great surprise and delight, this 1953 novel is every bit the equal of McEwan's work. Its unoriginal themes are the English class system and the loss of childhood innocence, but told with a devastatingly sad precision worthy of Forster. As the plot gradually unfolds, a sense of fatal mischance overwhelms the reader until the unexpected yet inevitable denouement comes to pass.

L.P. Hartley is a name I only know from the fading spine labels in the cheaper second hand bookshops. This is the only novel of his I could name, although I intend to find out more. I suppose he was once very popular but has since faded. Even The Go-Between is probably chiefly remembered for Joseph Losey's film version or for its epigrammatic opening line:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.