Drowning in endless choice and short of time? Then revisiting classic films, listening to songs where you know every lyric, even watching reruns of Only Fools and Horses (and still finding them amusing), is the kind of intellectual comfort food that will make sense.
But to pick up a loved novel after years of absence is something else. It is familiar yet unsettling, rooted in its era yet strangely full of modern resonances. Take The Go Between by L.P Hartley, a book that famously explores how the passage of time can twist and shape a memory. To a fourteen year old reader hooked on the illicit affair at the novel’s centre this is a book about sex. A girl or boy at that age would find it tapped into the preoccupations of their world at that time: secrecy, romance and, above all, sexual awakening. The heroine’s decision to marry the wealthy suitor she didn’t love would seem to a young girl a cruel injustice… And in many ways to the woman she becomes twenty years later, it still does. And yet perhaps the cynic in her would see that after all the bonking in the woodshed started to dwindle it might never have worked a modern Marian couldn’t possibly manage without a nanny and three holidays a year. Over the passage of life The Go Between becomes a darker book about class and sexual manipulation and inevitably the loss of innocence.
The mature Leo Colston starts his narration of The Go Between ‘The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.’ ‘Well just the same could be said for revisiting a novel after many years. The landscape looks the same but the people are not quite as you remember them. Having said that, you might remember with a degree of separation the young person you were when you first got lost in its pages, and just for a little while, be that person again.
