JOAN LONDON The Golden Age. Reviewed by Robyne Young

At its heart The Golden Age is about transformation, both for its characters and their culture.

Joan London’s first novel, Gilgamesh, delivered a remarkable reading experience and a master class in writing. Inspired by the world’s oldest known poem of the same name, the novel centres on a mother’s extraordinary journey as she searches, under the shadow of the looming Second World War, for the father of her child.

Her travels take her from rural Australia to London and the Middle East, but as epic as this journey is, it was London’s ability to take a scene, or a physical feature of a person, and describe it in an extraordinarily evocative and new way that proved to be the biggest hook:

He took his shoes off, rolled his trousers up and picked his way up and down the clearing. His stumpy little feet were fishbelly white, like prisoners he said, shut away for years from the light of day.

Apart from the original imagery, the way London gave each character space for his or her story absorbed me. By the end of the novel, I knew these people, their motivations, their sense of loss and longing.

I settled easily into her most recent novel, The Golden Age, set in 1954, and into the lives of its main characters, who connect through life at the Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Home in Perth, a former hotel, that ‘still looked like a country pub’ and was ‘bounded by four flat roads, like an island, which in its present incarnation seemed to symbolise its apartness, a natural quarantine’. There are the Jewish family of Frank Gold and his parents, Meyer and Ida; Elsa Briggs and her parents, Margaret and Jack, her siblings and Aunt Nance; Sister Olive Penny and her daughter, Elizabeth Ann; the Golden Age escapee, Albert Sutton, and Ann Lee, whose father decides his daughter will make a better recovery if she returns to the farm, and the staff.

The residents, confined to the home, were ‘not a worry or a burden to make their mothers sigh with weariness’ and were ‘in need of help to find their way back into the world’. But their mothers and fathers too, were sometimes overwhelmed with the need to be with their children. Elsa’s mother, Margaret, makes an impromptu visit unconcerned with the consequences, and Meyer proclaims ‘Vot da hell’ and calls in to see Frank. But the children, precious to their parents, inhabit a different world in a drama of their own. As Elsa observes:

Being here was like a play. The scenes rotated one after another – ward schoolroom, therapy – across the routines of the day. People came in, said their piece and left the stage.

Before being admitted to the Golden Age, Frank, having fled Budapest with his parents, is sent to the Infectious Diseases Branch of Perth Hospital where the patients are older. Now proclaiming himself a poet, he meets Sullivan Backhouse who, before being struck down by polio, had been ‘… going to sit his Leaving and go to the university to read English. (Read English? But we all do that, Frank thought.)’ Sullivan, whose condition is severe enough for him to be in an iron lung, introduces Frank to non-rhyming poetry and tells him of his father’s intention to publish his poems, to be titled On My Last Day on Earth.

Frank brings the prescription pad Sullivan used as a notebook to the Golden Age, but himself despairs that ‘Poetry had deserted him. There was no poetry here’, until he sees Elsa:

Her legs were long, she was tall, the tallest patient here. Tall as a small woman, but, as far as he could see, with the body of a boy. She was wearing a dress of blue and white stripes with a wide white collar. Her arms were thin and straight, her chest under the collar was almost flat. On her left calf he glimpsed a calliper below her hem, and her right foot was in a plaster cast. Her light golden-brown hair was pulled straight back into a single plait. Little gold wisps escaped and caught the low beams of sun around her forehead. Her skin was very pale.

He falls in love and enters what London calls ‘the third country’; his complete devotion to this country results in him and Elsa being deported. When he is parted from Elsa he gives his life to poetry, and visiting the library, but only when it is fine, not wanting to risk a Kafkaesque existence:

If it looked like rain he stayed home. It would be too hard to navigate his way – he feared umbrellas, puddles, slippery surfaces. He had an image of himself flailing on his back like an upturned beetle.

There are echoes here of one of Sullivan’s poems:

It turns out that

we are tough

as cockroaches.

For Frank’s father, Meyer, his experience of Australia is always tinged with the experience of losing most of his family, described by London in poetic prose:

He saw the watermelon clouds piled up above the dark breast of the river and he smelt the weedy flow of its depths. A fresh water breeze found him and, like a puppy, licked his face and neck, breathed cool life back into him. Water and summer evenings: ghosts of his past. The natural world, which was all he allowed himself to miss. Balaton. The lake, childhood. His brothers. He always felt better near water.

At its heart (and it has such a strong beating heart), The Golden Age is about transformation. Transformation of a pub to a facility to rehabilitate children. The transformation of Frank and Elsa from polio victims to acclaimed poet and doctor. Transformation from New Australian to Australian – and all that meant in 1954: a monarch, rhyming poems about bellbirds and a sense of home in ‘My Country’. Evidence of Ida’s transformation comes with the realisation that Australia is her home after she performs for the patients and their families:

Strange that this should be the moment that at last she fully understood. This was the land in which her life would take place, in which her music must grow. This was her audience. The émigrés, the petit bourgeois, the nouveau riche.

In an interview with Charlotte Wood for the Writer’s Room series, London said:

‘I had a real Chekhov thing for years. There’s no ego in his stories. He’s complete observer, in control, but at the service of the unexpected, of his art. He is very tough, unsentimental. And his canvas is so broad that everyone has their story; it might be the coachman, or a bishop or a princess, as well as the middle-class characters.’

Like Chekhov’s, London’s canvas is also broad. However, she is neither tough nor unsentimental. Her characters each have their stories. What texture this brings to the page and to the reader.

Joan London The Golden Age Vintage 2014 PB, 256pp $32.99

Robyne Young writes fiction, poetry and non-fiction, blogs at robynewithane.wordpress.com and works as the Communications Officer at Regional Arts NSW.

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

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Tags: Australian women writers, Joan | London