The Go-Between past that continues to exist in and to control the subconscious … This doubling of consciousness and of narrative voice—the innocent twelve-year-old's emerging from beneath the self-protective sixty-five-year-old's—is one of Hartley's most effective techniques.” Another preoccupation in Tóibín's introduction was how far the story of “The Go-Between” is based on fact, in the wake of Adrian Wright’s biographical study, "Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley". Although Leo is twelve at the time of the novel – the long, hot summer of 1900 – the five-year-old Hartley remembered that time afterwards as "a Golden Age". When he was about
The Go-Between (1971 film) not in profit. An enthusiastic John Russell Taylor wrote in "The Times" that, "Up to now, "Accident" was without argument Losey's best film; now in "The Go-Between" it has a serious contender for the title. And everything is achieved by apparently doing the absolute minimum." Charles Champlain in the "Los Angeles Times" wrote after the US premiere in November 1971 that "The Go-Between" was one of the best films of the previous six years. Andrew Sarris in the "Village Voice" labelled it the best film of the year. Writing in 1985, Joanne Klein saw the filmscript "as a major stylistic