At the Sydney Writers Festival last week, Tegan Bennett Daylight said The Golden Age was the best Australian novel she’d read in a long time. I also loved this superb story set in a children’s polio convalescent home and hope it scoops this year’s Miles Franklin Award to be announced on June 23.
Don’t be put off by the therapeutic setting. The characters and plot of The Golden Age are compelling. Even the Golden Age building itself—illuminated at night by the lights of the nearby Netting Factory—has magnetic appeal.
It makes sense to me that Joan London, author of The Golden Age, admires Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald for their rich but economic storytelling. Like these literary legends, London is adept in judging the moment to segue from detailed description to faster-paced action. She also evokes Australia in the 1950s with a keen eye, a compassionate heart and consummate skill.
The story revolves around two teenagers who fall in love during their treatment for polio. They are Frank Gold, aged 13, the child of Hungarian Jewish refugees who came to Perth after the Second World War, and Elsa Briggs, aged 12-and-a-half, the eldest daughter of an Australian family.
Thrown together by their illness to reside at the Golden Age, Frank, Elsa and the other children receiving care in the home form strong bonds and a new kind of community. Family members visit when they can, of course, and so readers gain insight into the lives of Frank’s and Elsa’s parents.
We are also privy to the predilections of some of the home’s staff. One of these is the home’s director, Sister Olive Penny, who is quite a liberated woman for her time. She has a long-term lover she visits infrequently and quickies with policemen in her office at the Golden Age. She is conscious of the safe times in her cycle, careful about STDs and swims alone in bracing seas. Sister Penny and Frank’s father Meyer are also attracted to each other.
Frank’s mother, Ida, is a serious pianist who has not played since she came to Australia until she performs for the Golden Age Christmas party. After the concert, she asks, ‘Why was it that the more praise and admiration she received, the smaller and sadder she felt?’
Before Ida flees Budapest, two older women called Julia and Hedwiga provide protection for Frank because the city is too dangerous for a young child. Frank recognises his time living with these women as an important turning point—crucial to his individuality and sense of self. London paints Julia and Hedwiga’s cameos well; they are bit-part players fulsomely wrought.
A young man in an iron lung called Sullivan makes friends with Frank in the early days of his polio treatment. He also inspires Frank to become a poet. When Sullivan dies Frank is deeply affected. By contrast, London writes, ‘Most of Frank’s relatives had been murdered during the war, but he had never felt their loss.’
Budapest: the glamorous love who betrayed him
While reading The Golden Age, I found myself thinking about Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop by Amy Witting, which was re-released by Text Classics in February this year. First published in 1999, the novel tells the story of Isobel Callaghan, who is taken to a sanatorium in the Blue Mountains, where she is inducted into a self-contained community of tuberculosis sufferers. The novel was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2000 and, like London’s most recent novel, it is characterised by a blend of compassion, wisdom and humour.
There are many heart-rending passages in The Golden Age. One I found particularly touching describes Frank’s father Meyer walking through Perth and musing about the city that has adopted him and all he has left behind in Europe.
‘It was like this. Budapest was the glamorous love of his life who had betrayed him. Perth was a flat-faced, wide-hipped country girl whom he’d been forced to take as a wife. Only time would tell if one day he would reach across and take her hand …
‘He had a suspicion that never again would he feel at home as he once had. Never again on this earth. And another suspicion: that to love a place, to imagine yourself belonging to it, was a life, a fiction. It was a vanity.
‘Especially for a Jew…
‘He, Ida and Frank had left behind all their family and friends, those who had survived. But the dead came with you.’
The back story about a little girl called Ann Lee is also beautifully rendered. Ann Lee has come to the Golden Age from Wiluna on the edge of the Gibson Desert ‘because of the brumbies’ … but no, I’m not going to tell you any more because I think you should read it and relish it yourself!
Another touching moment occurs when Frank revels in the sound of Elsa’s name.
‘Elsa, he said to himself in the doorway. He’d heard the name mentioned in the course of his few days here, always in a special, peaceful tone. El-sa like saying flow-er or wa-ter. He knew this could be nobody else. To his surprise, tears came to his eyes.’
For older readers The Golden Age (as its title so cleverly conveys) will provide a powerful trip down memory lane. Remember queuing for polio injections, the pink polio medicine on a little spoon and the kids in calipers who struggled up the school steps? Recall Akta-Vite, canned fruits set in jelly and the Queen and Duke’s visit to Perth, almost cancelled due to polio, and making headlines for days? Remember ‘New Australians’, who brought their exotic food and European and Asian sensibilities to our buttoned-up culture and (miraculously) started to shake it loose?
Set in and around 1954, the book provides a distinctive picture of Australian family life and society and the influence immigrants from Europe were having on Australian culture. A key theme is how resilient children can be when they’re ill and how vulnerable a family can be when one member is sick.
At the Sydney Writers Festival I learned that London is a deltiologist and that the postcards she collects of people’s faces serve as inspiration for her characters. I’m romantic enough to think the book’s beautiful cover image of a young man (Frank at 20 perhaps?) was the postcard propped in front of her while she wrote Frank’s story—fuelling her creative process.
London talks about her desire to make characters and stories as vivid as possible through precise images and deep feeling. She also says rhythm is important. Pick up The Golden Age and you’ll discover these qualities in perfect equipoise—enchanting, stirring, elegant—lighting the fire and drawing you in.
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