naively believes that Marian's engagement ought to bring the correspondence between her and Ted to an end. Feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the general atmosphere of deception and risk, Leo tries to end his role as go-between but comes under great psychological pressure and is forced to continue. Ultimately, his unwilling involvement has disastrous consequences when Marian's mother makes him accompany her as she tracks the lovers down to their hiding place and discovers them having sex. The trauma that results leads directly to Ted's suicide and Leo's nervous collapse. In the epilogue, the older Leo summarises how profoundly the experience has affected him. Forbidding himself to think about the scandal, he had shut down his emotions and imaginative nature, leaving room only for facts. As a result, he has never been able to establish intimate relationships. Now, looking back on the events through the eyes of a mature adult, he feels it is important to return to Brandham some 50 years later in order to tie up loose ends. There he meets Marian's grandson and finds Marian herself living in her former nanny's cottage. He also learns that Trimingham had married Marian and acknowledged Ted's son by her as his own. Trimingham had died in 1910; Marcus and his elder brother had fallen in World War I, Marian's son in World War II. In the end, the elderly Marian persuades Leo, the only other survivor from her past, to act once more as go-between and assure her estranged grandson that there was nothing to be ashamed of in her affair with Ted Burgess. Reception The Go-Between was first published in Britain by Hamish Hamilton in 1953. In the U.S., its publisher was Alfred A. Knopf in the summer of 1954, and the book was slow to sell at first. However, it was greeted with favourable reviews. The New York Times called it "a triumph of literary architecture", while two articles were devoted to it in the Los Angeles Times. Joseph Henry Jackson commented on its skilful presentation as “a many-leveled affair; perhaps only the author knows how much there is in it of symbol and reference." A month later Milton Merlin described it as "a superbly composed and an irresistibly haunting novel" characterised by "the author's beautiful and ingenious style, his whimsy, irony and humor, and, most of all, the powerful wallop of a deceptively simple, almost gentle story of