During the course of his stay, Leo navigates the social strata strongly in place at the time, and delights in the halycon summer. His innocence is touching, and you wish him to stay blissfully ignorant of the love affair in which he has become an integral part. However, it is a love-affair that can never be, and in a stormy and rainy night, it all comes to a climax, leaving our young narrator severely traumatised.

Throughout the book, the grown-up narrator reflects on his personality and how the events of that wonderful, but also terrible summer shaped him for the years to come.

This is a magnificent novel of an ill-fated love affair, but told from a different perspective. It belongs to an era long gone, before the First World War, when men were gentlemen and it was never the ladies fault.


Wistful, chaste, and utterly captivating.   December 27, 2002
 10 out of 10 found this review helpful

Resembling both McEwan's Atonement and Frayn's Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent's naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence.

Leo's summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host's sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby. Catastrophe is inevitable--and devastating to Leo.

In descriptive and nuanced prose, Hartley evokes the heat of summer and the emotional conflicts it heightens, the intensity rising along with the temperature. Magic spells, creatures of the zodiac, and mythology create an overlay of (chaste) paganism for Leo's perceptions, while widening the scope of Hartley's focus and providing innumerable parallels and symbols for the reader.

The emotional impact of the climax is tremendous, heightened by the author's use of three perspectives--Leo Colston as a man in his 60's, permanently damaged by events when he was 12; Leo as a 12-year-old, wrestling with new issues of class, social obligation, friendship, morality, and love, while inadvertently causing a disaster; and the reader himself, for whom hindsight and knowledge of history create powerful ironies as he views these events and the way of life they represent. Mary Whipple


Mercury's Discoveries And Revelations   November 25, 2002
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

There are few slim volumes of English prose that come as close to perfection as Hartley's masterpiece. Not a word; not a paragraph; not a page is wasted. Simple evocation of summer and the throbbing heat of oppression and sexuality. Poisonous plants grow in this season of plenty. Secrets are kept, the innocent are manipulated. A boy in his Lincoln green suit tells his tale. Gorgeous wonderful atmosphere is caught distilled and captured in the wonderful book forever. A 'must read' for those that have delighted in well-written English. Wonderful. Wonderful. Wonderful. As you may have guessed, I quite liked it!


English Classic   November 18, 2002
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

It is amazing to think how so many writers become remembered for just one work. LP Hartley is one such author. Other great books he has written, but, unsurprisingly, this, his best work is the most famous

Reviews here describe it as being a growing-up novel. While this is undeniably the case there is far more to it than that. It is also a portrayal of England's manners at the beginning of the twentieth-century, much as EM Forster's work is.

The compelling feature of this novel is the description. Read Hartley's passage describing the intense summer heat on a winter's day and you will feel the heat, you will smell the dry grass cuttings - it will be summer.

As a final point, I should like to say that this novel would be of special interest to anyone in the the counties of Norfolk (where the novel is set), Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, where the author spent much of his life in the Fens.