[The Go-Between] is a study of a boy's premature initiation into the mysteries of evil….

The Go-Between is a very literary novel, and its literariness is of a high quality; it is a very mannered novel, and its manners are excellent…. Yet for all its beautiful craftsmanship, the book somehow does not have much of the illusion of life. Probably the chief reason is that the center of psychological interest and the center of narrative interest do not coincide. One senses that Mr. Hartley feels in the problem of the boy who fails to attain emotional maturity an urgency, a reality, greater than the plot that is here invented to account for it.