Brickfield

The Brickfield #1

by L.P. Hartley

A masterly evocation of childhood and its influences on the adult mind, from the author of The Go-Between A lonely boy living on his uncle's farm in the Lincolnshire Fens, Richard Mardick's solitary existence is interrupted by a chance meeting, and idyllic love affair, with Lucy. A disused brickfield is the scene of their clandestine meetings, and it is there that Richard finds her drowned in a muddy pool. Forced by circumstances to look back on these days, Richard finds himself recounting this episode to his secretary. Its shattering significance throughout the rest of his life is put into remarkable perspective by the unusual framework with which Hartley has enclosed his story.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Classics, Novels, 20th Century, British Literature

6 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924) was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Reviews

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Brickfield has a lot in common with Hartley's The Go-Between, but it's less well realized. The story centers around an aging man, Richard, telling the story of a secret he has kept since his youth. Hartley is great at evoking a sense of the past. Throughout the narrative, Richard has a habit of pointing out bits of bygone, localized vocabulary: "You could hardly see the water for the blanket of greenish-yellow scum that grew on it—cott we called it." This, along with the descriptions of dogcarts and schoolmasters and caterpillar hunting, evoke a bygone time that really feels like another world (or foreign country, I guess I could say).

The problem with the novel is the secret itself. Hartley spends a lot of time building up to it, and not much really happens in the first half of the book. Beyond that, the themes of the flashback story don't really feel in harmony with the contemporary framing story. Richard's relationship with his secretary Denys is pretty unsubtly coded as gay, yet his secret is not related to being gay, and that theme is never really picked up anywhere else. There's also some really confusing bits at the end relating to Richard's health and some pills that may or may not have disappeared. It just feels like Hartley didn't quite pull it all together.

[Alun Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short novel (194 pages in the first edition), and is similar in some ways to "The Go-Between". The protagonist, Richard Mardick, is an elderly author with not long to live, who recounts to his much younger secretary (and literary executor to be), Denys, an incident from his adolescence that he has kept secret for fifty years, and which has marked him for life and prevented him from relating to women. (Richard's surname is perhaps a pun by the author). The younger Richard has been taken out of school because of his mother's fears for his health, and sent to live with a houseful of aunts and uncles in rural Lincolnshire. The book is fairly slow moving - we are well past page 100 before Richard's younger self first meets the young woman at the centre of his story. It is also far from explicit - if you are hoping for steamy adolescent passion you will be disappointed. It is however beautifully written.

However, for me, the main interest of the book is its undoubtedly semi-autobiographical character, which leaves one wondering just how much of the book is based on the author's own experience. L P Hartley was born in Dec 1895, so would have turned 67 at the end of 1962. The book seems to be set during 1963, when Richard is 67. The author was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, a few miles from Peterborough, while Richard was born in the fictional town of Fosdyke in Cambs. Hartley's family moved to Fletton Town in Peterborough when he was five, Richard's family to the fictional cathedral city of Medehamstead, which is what Peterborough was called before it was rechristened. Much of the book is set near Rookland, about 15 miles from Fosdyke, where a half-ruined abbey is a prominent feature of the landscape. Crowland is a similar distance from Whittlesey, and has a similar ruined abbey, with a history uncannily like that of the fictional abbey. Living in Peterborough as I do, all this is of greater interest to me that it may be to readers from elsewhere. Richard's school, called St Peter's in the novel, is very recognisable as "The King's School" (even the uniform is similar) , and a bike ride Richard takes from their home is easily identifiable with the route Hartley himself would have taken from there to Fletton Tower, though as far as I know, he was not actually educated there himself. Richard does not tell us exactly when the main narrative takes place, but he has turned 17, and talks about the weather being unusually dry, and says it is before 1914. I've taken a quick look at weather records, and this does seem to correspond quite closely to the summer of 1913, when Hartley would have been 17.
So there are fascinating parallels with Hartley's own life, and this has left me wanting to know more. Perhaps I shall read Adrian Wright's biography of the author. From what I've read in one of the reviews, Wright also believes "The Brickfield" to be autobiographical, and it would be fascinating to learn how closely some of the other locations in the book tally with Hartley's own early life.

So, a novel which should be of great interest to readers who are interested in the man behind the writer, though taken on its own merits it is a finely crafted but perhaps slight work, unlikely to linger in the reader's imagination in the way that "The Go-Between" does.

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiographical novel.

Quite moving, although the central character, Richard, recounting his life to Denys, tended to irritate; and he didn't quite convince me. I'm a huge fan of LPH though, so probably marked it up slightly.

[michelle]

(3.5)

....for nothing is so terrible as one's imagination pictures it - every reality has an antiseptic touch, however much it smarts.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suspense and yearning beautifully-conveyed; remember when you were seventeen?

[Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson · Rating 5 out of 5]

...always great to find an unread book by one of your favourite novelists.

"Why did one try to improve oneself? For one's own sake or for other people's"?

and...

"When I went back into the classroom or whatever we called it the master who took us in English literature said, 'You've done an excellent essay, Mardick.' I still remember the title of the essay, it was 'Which are more interesting -- persons or things."

...and one last...

"But guilty they made me feel , as any love does that one can't meet on equal terms."

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. Might say that it was quite similar to the go-between in presentation and the narrative however that does not take away from its worth. Hartley is able to capture that yearning for love that strikes in youth and the tragedy of it being taken away is all the more damning.

This edition slightly spoilt the ending in the blurb but nonetheless I enjoyed it.

[John Gillespie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent companion to The Go Between in that it is a chronicle of a brief time in an adolescent's life remembered in adulthood. Haunting and subtle. I need to read more books like this.

[Bunta Potter · Rating 4 out of 5]

LPH does childhood and adolescence very sympathetically. This novel stayed with me for years after I first read it, the yearnings and angst of Richard, the protagonist, are sharply evoked and the sadness of the ending seems inevitable given its period - an innocent romantic idyll brought to a tragic conclusion through fear and ignorance. And then, of course, LPH's other strength is as a chronicler of disillusionment and life-long regret, quietly reflective rather than screamingly raw. Nobody does it better.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

An elderly man tells his secretary the story of his childhood which is marred by 'illness' so he is sent to live with an assortment of relatives whilst being trained as a farmer. As a lonely teenager he meets a girl and his life changes. I found the ending disappointing. Slow going but lovely images and descriptions of the Lincolnshire countryside.