As winter descends on the Cambridge streets and your fingers are clenched, rigor mortis-like, around your handlebars, as your nose turns a permanently wind-scourged shade of purple, and you wonder whether the fluid in your brain has finally frozen, you know it’s time to get out L.P Hartley’s The Go-Between. Set in the blistering heat of summer of 1900, Hartley’s novel follows the story of 13-year-old Leo Colston, as he becomes the unwitting messenger in a love affair he is too young to understand. The story begins when a middle-aged Leo discovers his childhood diary, prompting him to remember the fateful summer when he visited his wealthy school friend, Marcus, and became embroiled in the lives of Marian and Ted. It is a book where the very pages feel warm to the touch. It is also a passionate condemnation of lust; a story, as L.P Hartley put it, of “innocence betrayed, and not only betrayed, but corrupted”.

Or is it?

It is rarely wise to let a writer be the judge of their own work. If it were, my essay comments would be far more complimentary. Consequently, Hartley’s claim needs probing. Despite the author’s repeated endorsement of prudish Victorian values in his letters and essays, a question which Leo poses shimmers like an unsettling heat haze over the novel: “why should we call ourselves sinners?”. The narrative is packed with symbolism warning of the dangers of sexuality; at one point, a fabulously Freudian Deadly Nightshade plant ambushes Leo after he strays from the manicured lawns (think The Day of the Triffids gone rogue). At the same time, however, there is a sensual beauty to the novel which undermines Hartley’s consciously moral intentions. The reader, like Leo, enjoys “complete corporeal union with the summer”, basking in sumptuous sentences and heady descriptions. Everything is transfigured by the heat, and Leo’s narrative tingles with unarticulated, instinctive yearning. Lust is both condemned and implicitly, impulsively condoned.

Several directors have tried to capture the potent atmosphere of The Go-Between. In 1971, Harold Pinter provided the screenplay for Joseph Losey’s film adaptation. More recently, the BBC have tried their hand at a dramatisation – they never can resist sweeping lawns, aristocratic romps and shots of floating pollen. There has even been a misguided attempt to turn the novel into a West End musical (it’s hard to take Leo seriously as he warbles and prances through a rotating cornfield). Despite their enjoyable aspects, none of these adaptations manage to convey the rich detail and imaginative power of the book. Indeed, perhaps the change in medium renders this impossible; so much of the novel rests on the subversive power of putting pen to paper, be that as a letter writer, as a diarist or as an author.

What we are left with, therefore, is a book ostensibly revolted by sexuality and which refuses to allow itself to be reproduced. However, at the heart of The Go-Between is a very different sort of lust. Indeed, it is not lust at all, simply a desire for union. This desire is not related to Marian and Ted, but to the two forms of Leo: the young and the old. As we watch our emotionally crippled, middle-aged narrator revisit his passionate past self, we are forced to ask what binds us together as one person through time. And the frightening answer Hartley seems to provide is: nothing. Ultimately, it’s not Marian and Ted who need a go-between: it’s Leo