[In The Go-Between,] the story of a young lad exploited by two passionate clandestine lovers, Hartley intends us to see an extra dimension, the pattern of this century: a self-deceiving idealism that denies human reality, the exploitation of people and feelings for ulterior ends, a willingness to indulge in irrationality, that all combine to produce disaster….

The novel deals with the repression of true feeling, and its consequences. It is—like its protagonist—very selfconscious, and is elaborately wrought. The reader needs not only to come to terms with the social codes of the turn of the century, to recognise the social and sexual blinkering of the middle-class young of the time, and to respond sympathetically to the introverted and unworldly young protagonist, Leo Colston, but also to appreciate the sophisticated and even knowing use of various literary devices, especially irony, allusion and symbolism.

These last features are crucial to the work; their deployment is, in a sense, its main concern. The repressed young protagonist sublimates his half-recognised feelings into fantasies and idealisation: he interprets life in terms of fairy-tale and romance. Part of the problem of The Go-Between is that, while this is a characteristic of his, it is also, to a very great extent, the method of the novel itself. Leo composes fictions; and Hartley's fiction in turn parades its fictional devices and echoes, so that this almost seems the real subject: the fictionalisation of experience into art. (p. 45)

[One] way of defining The Go-Between would be as an ironic pastoral romance…. The ironic mode is one where the hero's 'power or intelligence is inferior to ours, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration or absurdity'. Clearly this is the case with the young protagonist, Leo; the narrator—his adult self, Lionel—to some extent distances himself from him, presenting his thoughts and actions with some irony, but not unsympathetically; and the work's obvious artifice has settled over the action…. (pp. 45-6)

Hartley's work depends on its knowing, indirect narrative technique….

James's influence upon Hartley is apparent … in his use of the child as central figure and reflector, and in setting adult guilty knowledge against childish innocence…. Hartley also makes use of the 'cult of the child', the view of the child as having a freshness of perception and strength of response that are lost with the coming of adulthood. (p. 46)

Hartley stresses that the twentieth-century emphasis on impersonal forces—economic or psychological—has weakened the concept of individual responsibility, with which he is concerned here: 'with the weakening of our belief in free-will, the word "fault", like the word "ought" has lost much of its strength and meaning … some defect of character or conduct which would once have unhesitatingly been called "our fault" is now ascribed to causes over which we have no control, or very little'. Within its view of an ordered society, the novel deals with questions of individual morality. (p. 48)

Under the surface of The Go-Between the familiar structures of romance can readily be seen. The novel is filled with explicit allusions to romance material of various kinds to myth, legend and fairy-tale…. All these serve not only to suggest the cast of mind of Leo/Lionel, but also dispose the reader to view the material in the light of romance. That is, not only to see further significance, but also, it seems, to assimilate the material to 'story-time', long ago and far away, the past, where 'they do things differently'…. (p. 49)

Romance provides the basic organisation for the work, but other stylistic features are also very apparent, in a way that tends to subordinate 'realism' to literary pattern. There is a continuous verbal nudging or irony…. [Also] there is an elaborate system of symbols demanding recognition: the summer heat, equated with sexuality and will, so that the carefully recorded daily temperatures trace the progress of Leo and the lovers;… the ambivalence of green, that associates Leo with nature and freshness, and also with naïveté and ineptitude. (p. 53)

The pushing of the story into the past, the child-centred viewpoint, the deliberate obstrusiveness of the literary devices, make it … a shapely and selfconscious fiction, not kinetic but aesthetic in its end. Yet Hartley's object was not merely aesthetic, but also humane….