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Fully present, utterly connected: The Golden Age by Joan London

Tegan Bennett Daylight on Joan London

It is important to note that despite its setting, The Golden Age is not a misery novel. It does not tell a story of abuse, and although it gives us a candid and painful account of Frank’s suffering, both as a small boy hidden from Nazis in 1940s Budapest and a few years later as a polio patient, it does not ask us to be either voyeur or fellow-sufferer. The Golden Age is a story about Frank’s dawning and intensely vivid realisation of self.

When I remember being a child and reading, I think first of sunlight, which I was always manoeuvring to be partly, though not wholly, in. This sunlight is always linked to quiet, to stillness. The sense of movement around me, but happening at a distance – my mother talking on the telephone (her voice louder as she strayed to the very end of the cord), or my sister using her sewing machine – the sort of movement that envelops you but allows you to be alone. The psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips, referring to D. W. Winnicott’s essay ‘The Capacity to be Alone’ (1958), says that ‘the goal for the child is to be alone in the presence of the mother. For a long time this has seemed to me to be the single best definition of reading’.

Perhaps the best definition of good writing is the kind that recreates this safe aloneness, this suspended awareness of the self, this being lost but at the same time attached. We adult readers can go a long time between books that have this effect, and still be entertained and even inspired by what we read. But if we are lucky, every few years a book or a writer will appear that brings this sense back – a book that makes us feel as though that stillness in the centre of movement has been both captured and, in the act of reading, reproduced.

Joan London’s The Golden Age is this kind of book, and as I have learned in these last months of reading, she is this kind of writer. The best word that I can come up with to describe London’s voice is mature , which has not much to do with the author’s age, and everything to do with her skill. It is the sort of writing that does not immediately invite a mental reply, whether that reply is how wonderful! or how awful! It does not obscure its subject – no chorus line of verbs or orchestra of adjectives gets in the way of what she is writing about. Her writing, which calls attention to itself only by its precision, gives you an opportunity, the way silence sometimes does, to reflect productively. Best of all, it returns you to an early pleasure: the pleasure of story, of wanting to know what happens next.

The Golden Age is set in a children’s convalescent home for victims of polio – the novel sitting solidly on the foundations of the real place (same name, same function) in 1950s Perth – and tells the story of a twelve year old boy, Frank Gold. Frank is the child of Hungarian refugees Ida and Meyer, who have come unwillingly to Perth (they had hoped for America). Meyer has done more than resign himself to this; he has a capacity for happiness that carries him though the novel. He is always on the move, always buoyant, always alight. Ida, on the other hand, is still and dark and angry. The miseries and terrible losses of the Holocaust will never be in the past for her, and her son’s disablement by polio, contracted after they settle in Perth, is one cruelty too many. Once she was a concert pianist, but since Frank’s illness she has not touched a piano. Her not-playing – and the resolution of this – is one of the book’s background melodies, if you will: a sad tune, quietly heard throughout.

The novel opens as vividly as a dream, announcing its reality with the same feeling a dream gives you: that same, inevitable, this could only be as it is .

One afternoon during rest-time, the new boy, Frank Gold, left his bed, lowered himself into his wheelchair and glided down the corridor. There was nobody around.

Already we find Frank in search of the same space that the fortunate reader inhabits: a space where he is held and kept safe, in his case by the hospital, but nonetheless allowed to be alone. It is important to note that despite its setting, The Golden Age is not a misery novel. It does not tell a story of abuse, and although it gives us a candid and painful account of Frank’s suffering, both as a small boy hidden from Nazis in 1940s Budapest and a few years later as a polio patient, it does not ask us to be either voyeur or fellow-sufferer. The Golden Age is a story about Frank’s dawning and intensely vivid realisation of self – probably accelerated or exaggerated by his experience as a patient, but in truth available to any child who is given enough psychic space in which to grow up.

Frank has been moved from the adults’ polio hospital to The Golden Age, where he will be the oldest patient. It feels to him like a demotion. In his previous incarnation as The Kid at IDB (the Infectious Diseases Branch of the Royal Perth Hospital), he was able to exploit his capacity for charm, to make friends, to feel freer, less seen. At IDB, he met Sullivan, an ‘adult’ (just eighteen) in the iron lung ward, who would lie all day looking at the white ceiling, thinking and composing poetry:

Overnight it must have snowed this is all I can see now.

The two spend hours together. Frank transcribes Sullivan’s poetry, and comes to understand that to be a poet is his vocation too. He writes his rhymeless verse on a discarded prescription pad. Conversation about poetry achieves for the two patients what literature sometimes can – respite, and a feeling of clarity in the midst of chaos. London creates a sense of genuine companionship between these two. She does not overstate the pathos of Sullivan’s death in the early pages of the novel, intuitively understanding – or perhaps remembering – how children deal with loss. In this understatement, she renders their relationship indelible.

After Sullivan’s death, it is thought that Frank will do better at a hospital for children. This is where we see him first, climbing into his wheelchair at rest-time in The Golden Age, with one object: to glimpse the only other child his age, Elsa. She is the single creature who saves him from disgust at his new surroundings, from the indignity of his demotion. The relationship with Elsa is the new poetry in his life; he has someone to write to again. Elsa already has the sense of self that Frank is moving towards. Her status as the oldest child in her family has something to do with this, but it is polio that has given her the strength and calm that Frank is drawn to. London’s description of Elsa’s initial infection and her time in the Isolation Ward – clearly the worst and most painful part of each patient’s illness – is frightening. But it is also balanced, like Elsa herself. Elsa survives, partly for her mother, but partly because of a self she has found at the height of her suffering: ‘another person inside her who had suddenly taken charge, a sort of captain who was going to hold on no matter what’.

Elsa’s captain calls to Frank’s poet. This calling could be said to constitute the plot of The Golden Age : Elsa and Frank ‘fall in love’ (or in fact, simply love each other), and their growing relationship results in a physical encounter that causes the main movement or upheaval of the narrative. But the plot is infinitely more complex and interesting than this suggests. To focus on their relationship and its potential difficulties would be to forget all the fascinating action that takes place around them. London has a deep awareness of her characters’ sensual selves, and Elsa and Frank are not the only two people awakened to their bodies. Sister Olive Penny from The Golden Age, whose husband has died in the war and whose daughter has grown up, is visited by a few of the local policemen for encounters that are as satisfying and sustaining to her as they presumably are to the men, whose point of view we are not treated to. The description of Sister Penny putting ‘her soft breasts back in their cups, button[ing] her uniform, quickly stuff[ing] a hanky into her knickers’ and reflecting that her sex life ‘fed into her work’ is as vivid and sensual as any explicit scene. She is a sexually awake woman who is neither predator nor victim, and only one of The Golden Age ’s richly imagined secondary characters.

The Golden Age is told in the third-person and moves through points of view which are signalled by chapters with titles such as ‘Frank’s Vocation’, but which are sometimes to do with location: ‘The Sea’, ‘The Verandah’. Each character who thinks or speaks is allowed London’s careful attention, from Meyer and Olive through to Elsa’s mother, whose grief for and worry about her daughter is as judiciously handled as all the other emotional content of this novel. Comparisons have been made before to the work of Alice Munro, and indeed London has that same respect for every character that Munro does. Her writing is free from the sort of contempt that so many novelists rain down on their minor characters. Often you can feel a writer dealing various blows to people they would like to punish, whether the man who cut them off in traffic or the girl who bullied them at school. Anyone who writes knows that this can be a temptation hard to resist, but London shares with Munro and her hero Chekhov a determination to realise her characters’ inner selves, so that their faults and casual cruelties are universal and, most importantly, shared or borne by the author.

One can feel a sort of patience at work in London’s choice of words, as though she is prepared to wait for the right expression – as when Frank reflects on his move to The Golden Age:

He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home.

In an excellent interview with Charlotte Wood (part of Wood’s digital treasure trove, The Writer’s Room ), London talks of the work editors have done for her:

they apply themselves with unstinting concentration to the sense and logic of your sentences, the unconscious contradictions or repetitions you have made, and commit themselves to the voice and point of view of the writer.

If this is so, then London is very lucky, because her editors are so good that their presence in the text cannot be detected. The Golden Age reads as though only London herself has had control of the words, and that control has come about through this deep and patient waiting, a kind of resistance to the hurriedness of publishing schedules and contemporary life.

London’s previous novels, Gilgamesh (2000) and The Good Parents (2008) have this same centredness, and the same kind of architecture. London incorporates stories from past and present, characters major and minor, in their youth and maturity. In doing so, she risks building novels that look as though they have been frequently renovated. But I am noticing her structures with a reviewer’s eye, trying to understand the way she works; to the reader I gratefully and restfully became in my first pass through The Golden Age , the architecture is almost invisible. So many contemporary novels fail to do what Annie Dillard calls ‘erasing your tracks’. They can make you feel unpleasantly active, always aware of the writer and their elaborate scaffolding. By contrast, London’s novels seem to float, unsupported.

There are themes running through all of London’s novels – a rather high number of difficult sisters (perhaps because London has sisters herself), and an abiding interest in the past. In The Writer’s Room interview she says:

I think that often the older you get the more you write about the past. I notice that with Alice Munro. Her stories were once coming right out of the recent past, or at the time of writing, of children and marriage and lovers and things like that. Now, more and more, they are set in the past, in her childhood in the 1930s and so on.

She goes on to say:

Perhaps the individual events in one’s own life stop being so momentous, and one’s interest switches to those events in the past that are the origin of where we are now, individually or socially.

And perhaps this is what I mean by the maturity in London’s writing: the slow shifting of focus from the self to the universal; the understanding that who we are is not simply about us. In Gilgamesh , the main character Edith is interrogated by her Anglo-Russian cousin Leopold about Group Settlement in Western Australia: ‘Was it a social experiment? And, if not, had it fulfilled its capitalist aims?’ Edith and her sister cannot answer: ‘They had never thought of these questions, in fact they did not really understand their terms.’ In this brief scene, London captures the childlike self-centredness of white Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, and brings us to consider the gift that was post-war settlement, the alteration in Australian culture that occurred with the influx of European refugees, a kind of awakening. The universal in the personal, all in the space of a page.

London still draws on her own experience, but it is atmosphere she seeks, not narrative. Of 1954, the year in which The Golden Age is largely set, London says, ‘I was six then, and for some reason that time has a sort of light around it’. This instinct, to try and capture this ‘light’, gives a certain radiance to all of London’s work.

London has said that most of her ideas now become novels, although she has been writing short stories since the late 1980s. I like the short stories less than her longer work, though they are invariably Londonesque in being closely observed and beautifully written. But by comparison with the novels, they seem to lack articulation, or declaration; they never quite tell you what they are about . Though they have that same tendency to intricate architecture, the architecture is not invisible – it disguises intent, muffles voice. There is also a variation of tone, which I know many would praise in a collection of short stories, but which I find to be simply distracting. This is not true, however, of the two most recent inclusions in London’s collection The New Dark Age (2010): ‘The Photographer’ and the title story. The latter is only twenty pages long but has that astounding Munrovian effect: it is a jack-in-the-box story, full of compressed information, which when released springs into something much bigger.

In some of Munro’s best stories, and in London’s novels, we often meet characters in their earliest youth and then move over large tracts of their life into their old age. It’s an odd feeling, being asked to be suddenly familiar with a character who has aged 40 or 50 years – and often, in both Munro’s and London’s work, a character who has shed the violent quirks of youth and become someone more thoughtful, more measured. This was my only difficulty with The Golden Age . The story ends fifty years beyond its beginnings, in New York. The ending has the feeling of a coda, but also of an attempted resolution. Frank is now imagined as ‘an old man with a cane’, but a successful poet, too, with his laptop and his ergonomic chair. Perhaps it is resolution itself that I have difficulty with, when The Golden Age feels all about irresolution, about movement and growth and continuous change, with time feeling endlessly springy and resilient. In other words, perhaps it is my problem. I certainly hated seeing Frank surrounded by the trappings of the twenty-first century. It felt like a misstep, a change in tone too abrupt, a surrender to the reader’s curiosity, when perhaps the reader ought to be left in that lovely suspended state in which Frank and Elsa find themselves in the penultimate chapter.

The Golden Age is nevertheless a book that carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become. Adam Phillips notes the importance of ‘the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands’. When I look into my life, I see myself sitting in a car with my husband while the Bathurst plains unroll beside us; under the changing shade of a tree with a child asleep on my lap; holding my mother’s hand in the last weeks of her life. In the presence of someone – fully present, utterly connected, but being asked for nothing. It is this magical state that Joan London’s new novel conjures up.

Joan London, Gilgamesh (Picador, 2000). Joan London, The Good Parents (Picador, 2008). Joan London, The New Dark Age (Vintage, 2010). Charlotte Wood, The Writer’s Room Interviews.

THE GOLDEN AGE

by Joan London ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2016

Every character, however minor, comes to life in these pages. Like her fictional pianist, London is a virtuoso.

Award-winning Australian author London ( The Good Parents , 2008, etc.) illuminates lives touched by polio and World War II in her third novel, set in a convalescent home in Perth.

A children's polio clinic called The Golden Age serves as the book's focus. Beside it stands the Netting Factory, operating noisily day and night. The children, brought up never to waste electricity, find the factory "breathtakingly extravagant." It seems to promise " No one will ever die here. " In short, vivid chapters, London draws the reader into her characters' lives. Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, a Jewish refugee from Hungary, discovers poetry. When asked how he knows the word "nostalgia," Frank thinks: "How could he not? Nostalgia was everywhere. It had a special voice, and special time—sunset, Sunday nights." He falls in love with another patient, Elsa, who's mourning the loss of her bike, Malvern. Meanwhile, Frank's parents, Meyer and Ida, try to adjust to a city wholly unlike their beloved Budapest. Ida, a concert pianist, has refused to play since Frank contracted polio. London's work has garnered many Australian prizes—the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction, the Patrick White Literary Award, and others—for good reason. Her writing is cleareyed, generous-hearted, never sentimental: "Meyer sat down humbly on the white cover, next to his son's wasted legs....This is why the human race goes on having children, he thought. To remind us of the bliss of being loved." The horror and unfairness of the disease exist alongside the tenderness of human connections. At its heart, the book is about people living in places they never chose: the polio clinic, for the children in wheelchairs and calipers; Australia, for Frank's cultured parents. In one of the book's most moving scenes, Ida plays the piano for a charity benefit. In front of sleepy children and townsfolk "fresh-shaven, with big, clean ears," she nonetheless strives for perfection. "This was the land in which her life would take place....This was her audience....She must do her very best."

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-60945-332-9

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

LITERARY FICTION

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edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

by Margaret Atwood

SEEN & HEARD

Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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Book Review: The Golden Age by Joan London

Following is the fifth of Angela Long’s book reviews from the 2015 Stella Prize shortlist. Follow Angela on Twitter as she tweets her reading progress! See the full longlist here .

Author: Joan London
Category : Literary Fiction
Publisher: August 2014 Vintage Press/Random House Australia Review by Angela Long for Welcome to my Library

Summary: This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life. From one of Australia’s most loved novelists. He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home. It is 1954 and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after contracting polio in Australia.

At the Golden Age Children’s Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he sees Elsa, a fellow-patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry. Where children must learn that they are alone, even within their families.

Review: Set in the 1950’s, The Golden Years by Joan London is a novel of displacement and longing, where people are pulled between their need to connect and their knowledge that they are ultimately alone in the world.

The Gold family are survivors; through the ravages of war-torn Hungary, they have survived, ‘cellars, ceilings, bombing, near starvation’ and have found a new life in Australia, a new start, where their future and hopes are embodied in their son Frank. But polio doesn’t discriminate against those who have already suffered and after surviving the initial onslaught of the disease, Frank, almost thirteen, is transferred to The Golden Age children’s convalescent home to re-learn, and re-build his tortured muscles and spirit; he must learn ‘to be normal’ again. But there is always a shadow. The shadow of pain and suffering, the shadow of loss; Frank sees it in his parents and refuses to be ‘their only light’ the source of all their happiness. Inspired by another young polio victim, Frank turns to poetry to articulate his feelings. He knows in poetry he has found his vocation and his poetry is brought to life when he meets his muse Elsa Briggs. With their bodies twisted by polio, neither will have the future they dreamed of, or longed for, and it is this shared displacement that brings them together. In each other they see their sameness and become each other’s source of happiness, forming a bond that seems beyond their tender years.

Through gentle, clear prose, Joan London captures the emotions of an era in the microcosm of The Golden Age. Poetry and music is juxtaposed with the harsh Australian climate and the country that the Gold family have left is a paradox of the one they now call home.

‘ 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 …’

Using the stoicism of the era; a time when loss was everywhere, the loss of loved ones, sense of place, their dreams and future; the characters accept their mutual hardships and quietly go about their business while still feeling the deep undercurrents of their emotions. Each of London’s characters are beautifully developed, full-bodied, capable of love and deceit, strength and weakness, but it is connection that each longs for. The Golden Age pulls the characters towards it, an island of hope in a time of misery, where connections are made, children become adults and adults ‘find their way back into the world.’

Although the narrative voice is primarily that of young Frank Gold, other characters are overlayed into a complex mix. The swift viewpoint changes can at times be confusing, but ultimately add to the overall structure where the internal dialogue of the individual becomes our window to their true thoughts, without a mask or the misinterpretations of others. It is here that London triumphs and we realise that no matter how much we long for connection ‘each person was alone and the world went on, no matter what was happening to you.’

In The Golden Age , as the name suggests, nothing is forever and Frank ultimately realises, ‘He would always be alone.’ ‘In the end we are all orphans.’

Buy this book : Random House Australia , Booktopia , Bookworld or download from iBooks or Amazon.

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For more information about Joan London visit Random Hous e Australia.

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Catherine Meyrick

Historical fiction with a touch of romance, book review – the golden age by joan london.

The Golden Age is a Perth convalescent hospital for children recovering from poliomyelitis. Under the care of dedicated nurses and physiotherapists, the children are taught to use their limbs again and to gain the independence necessary for their return to the outside world. In this nurturing environment, cut off from their familiar lives with family contact limited, the children form attachments to each other and the dedicated staff who are overseen by Sister Olive Penny, a professional and caring nurse with a deep understanding of the vagaries of the human heart.

Twelve year old Frank Gold has been sent to the hospital from the Infectious Diseases Branch of the Royal Perth Hospital where he had become close to an older polio patient, the critically ill Sullivan Backhouse, who had opened up for Frank what becomes his vocation – writing poetry. At the Golden Age, Frank is drawn to beautiful and calm Elsa Briggs. The two oldest children in the hospital, they form a close bond and share their stories of their lives before polio and their struggles with the limitations the illness has placed on them.

Frank and his family are displaced Jewish refugees from Hungary who arrived during the mass resettlement following World War 2. Like so many who had survived the war, they are the last living members of large extended families. Frank’s father Meyer, a survivor of the forced labour camps, drives a soft drink truck and is slowly coming to see the ‘mystery and potential’ of this place more than a world away from cosmopolitan pre-war Budapest. The struggle to adapt is harder for his wife Ida, now working as a milliner, who was a concert pianist and has not touched the piano since Frank became ill. Life both within and outside the hospital is beautifully drawn in Joan London’s lyrical poetic prose which evokes the light and heat as well as the combination of blandness and uniqueness of the Perth suburban landscape in 1954. Even the more minor characters in The Golden Age are rounded, from Elsa’s parents to wheelchair bound Albert Sutton who believes he cannot become well until he returns home. The story is told in the third-person and moves fluidly between all points of view including the more minor characters to produce a rich and complex story.

Ultimately The Golden Age is a story of transitions – from sickness to health, from childhood towards adulthood, from outsider to belonging. It is also a story of the many forms love takes and the way it helps us survive. Memorable and gently told, The Golden Age stayed with me for days after reading it.

A more detailed review can be found here .

Review: 'The Golden Age,' by Joan London

FICTION: A young Jewish refugee is struck by polio and tries to make a life in an Australian convalescent home.

By KATHERINE BAILEY

The title of Joan London's book "The Golden Age" refers not to an era but to a children's polio convalescent home in Perth, Australia. Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold has needed a wheelchair since he contracted polio at the height of the epidemic in the late 1940s. He resents the loss of privacy at the Golden Age. He abhors "the babyishness of the place, its pygmy toilets, its naps and rules, half-hospital, half-nursery school, and his feelings of demotion when he was sent here."

Frank "felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home."

Each of the patients had an onset story. Frank's was in no way remarkable. "It involved a blinding headache, his refusal to get up [out of bed] and fever and dizziness as Meyer, his father, carried him to the ambulance."

The Golds were Jewish refugees deported to Australia from their native Budapest. It appeared that life in Australia would bring them happiness until Frank was struck with the disease. Meyer muses: "As if a curse had pursued them from the Old World and was not quite done with them, and still had the cruelest trick of all up its sleeve. It completed his sense of powerlessness that he had not protected his boy."

Characterization is the novel's primary achievement. Readers will feel affection for Frank and the many secondary characters.

Katherine Bailey is a book critic in Bloomington.

The Golden Age By: Joan London. Publisher: Europa Editions, 221 pages, $17.

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The Golden Age (2014), by Joan London

I think that I felt this uncharacteristic anxiety because the book is set in a polio hospital and it brought back childhood memories of other – slightly older – children that I knew who had fallen victim to polio. As a very small child, I didn’t understand that the miracle of vaccination protected my luckier generation against the disease, and I was frightened of it. I now know that I was not alone – Philip Roth has recently written vividly about the widespread fear of the disease in his novella Nemesis ( see my review ), and this excerpt from the Atlantic explains why:

It started out as a head cold. Then, the day before Halloween, 6-year-old Frankie Flood began gasping for breath. His parents rushed him to City Hospital in Syracuse, New York, where a spinal tap confirmed the diagnosis every parent feared most in 1953: poliomyelitis. He died on his way to the operating room. “Frankie could not swallow—he was literally drowning in his own secretions,” wrote his twin sister, Janice, decades later. “Dad cradled his only son as best he could while hampered by the fact that the only part of Frankie’s body that remained outside the iron lung was his head and neck.” At a time when a single case of Ebola or enterovirus can start a national panic, it’s hard to remember the sheer scale of the polio epidemic. In the peak year of 1952, there were nearly 60,000 cases throughout America; 3,000 were fatal, and 21,000 left their victims paralyzed. In Frankie Flood’s first-grade classroom in Syracuse, New York, eight children out of 24 were hospitalized for polio over the course of a few days. Three of them died, and others, including Janice, spent years learning to walk again. The Atlantic Oct 28th 2014

Incongruously named, The Golden Age (1949-1959) in Perth was an actual children’s polio convalescent home for what came to be the last generation of children who fell victim to this crippling and often fatal disease. What puzzled me from the outset was why Joan London had chosen this strange name as the title for her book, and how an era fraught with the fear of this disease, could be a ‘golden age’ .

But as I read on, I began to identify the author’s nostalgia for some of the values of that era. The characters in this novel are focussed on life and death; they deal with a dreadful situation with hope; they cherish progress towards rehabilitation. They are not materialistic: they know what really matters. They value peace, love and as much health – including mental health – as can be salvaged.

The children deal with loss better than the adults. Frank’s father, as you can see in the Sensational Snippet I posted earlier this week, has been able to find some pleasure in life despite the loss of everything he held dear, but his wife, a concert pianist in Hungary, remains desolate. She reminded me of refugees I’ve read about in the media: people who have escaped horrors in their homeland only to have further disasters afflict their family here in Australia. Fate can be unspeakably cruel.

The children are more resilient though they have no illusions: Frank Gold and Elsa Briggs are 12-year-old patients who witness death and know that their luck is in their survival. But they also know that their lives are irrevocably altered.

One day when her mother had taken Jane with her to the shop, Elsa went into her parents’ dark bedroom and opened the wardrobe. On the back of the door was a long mirror. She put the light on and saw a thin, flat-chested girl with a clunky brace on her left calf, one shoulder higher than the other, the once fluid lines of her body now distorted. She was surprised by her eyes, their intensity. She used to hear people say, ‘What a pretty girl.’ Now they’d say, ‘the crippled girl’ or ‘what a shame’. (p. 220)

Frank, craving books in a book shop tells the proprietor that he intends to get a job but that right now he doesn’t have even a shilling for a layby deposit.

If he had not caught polio he would have had a job, he knew. Selling newspapers after school, running errands, sweeping out a shop. By now he would have been able to help his parents. (p. 200)

Little Albert values home , and is desperate to get there. All he wanted to do was to open the front door and hear them say. ‘Allo! ‘Ere’s our Albert!’ So in the middle of the night he hauls himself into his wheelchair and rolls out through the unlocked door of the hospital …

The air was still warm. He could hear the chirp of crickets. He left the lights of the netting factory behind and rolled past the dark houses towards the railway line. The wheels squeaked a little, they needed to be oiled. When he got home he knew exactly where his brother Reggie’s oil can was. At the railway line he turned left. At this point, unlike the railway line, which was down in a gully, the road climbed. Again and again Albert started off, but each time, halfway up, he was unable to reach the top. He knew he mustn’t cry. Suddenly his arms couldn’t do it any more. He was so tired that he rolled off the road into the long grasses of the verge beside it. He put on his brake, climbed out and lay down in the dry, rustling grass. As the moon rose high in the sky he fell asleep. (p. 173)

It’s a bit hard to read what happens next without a lump in the throat. As I said, Joan London isn’t sentimental.

This is a beautiful, inspiring book. A tale of human courage, and love in unexpected places. Joan London is not a prolific writer, but it’s been well worth the wait.

Shall I comment about the cover? Yes, I shall. It is awful . That image is apparently Dieter on the train, Sweden, 1984. Wrong nationality. Wrong place. Wrong era. A young man of that age has no relevance whatsoever to what’s in the book. Joan London deserves better.

There’s an illuminating interview at the SMH and Geordie Williamson reviewed it for The Australian .

Author: Joan London Title: The Golden Age Random House, 2014 ISBN:9781741666441 Source: Personal copy, purchased from Readings.

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CHANIN Eileen
CHARLWOOD Don
CHAROLA Erika
CHATER Lauren
Chatwin Bruce
Chekhov Anton
Chen Sanping
Chen Te Ping
CHENG Melanie
CHESTERMAN John
Chevalier Tracy
Chiaverini Jennifer
CHIDGEY Catherine
Chistyakov Ivan
Chizhova Elena
CHONG Eileen
CHRISTIE Alexandra
Christie Michael
CHUGUNA Jukuna Mona
Chukovskaya Lydia
Chung Catherine
CHURCHER Betty
CICA Natasha
Clacy Ellen
CLANCHY John
CLARK Judith
CLARKE Marcus
CLARKE Maxine Beneba
Claudel Philippe
CLAYTON Hamish
CLEARY Simon
CLEAVE Chris
Cleland John
CLIFT Charmian
CLODE Danielle
CLOHESY Bernadette
Coates Donna
COCHRANE Geoff
COCHRANE Peter
COETZEE J M
COHEN David
Cohen Marcelo
Cohen-Portheim Paul
Cohne-Scali Sarah
COLE Jessie
COLE-ADAMS, Kate
COLEMAN Claire G
COLEMAN Dylan
Colette Sidonie-Gabrielle
COLIN-JAMES Sally
COLLEY Brendan
Collier Catrin
COLLINS Alan
COLLINS Carolyn
COLLINS Christy
COLLINS Courtney
COLLINS Ros
Collins Wilkie
COLLIS Paul
COLQUHOUN Judith
COLTHEART Lenore
CONDON Matthew
Conlon Evelyn
Connolly, John
CONNORS Libby
Conrad Joseph
CONROY THom
CONSTABLE Kate
CONTE, Steven
COOK Kenneth
COOKE Alana Bolton
COOKE Richard
COOMBS Anne
CORKE Alison
CORKE Dr Charlie
CORMICK Craig
CORNELIUS Patricia
COSGROVE Katerina
Costello Mary
COTTIER P S
COULTHART Ross
Courtemanche Gil
COUZENS Vicki
COVENTRY David
COWELL Brendan
CRANE Ralph
Crane Stephen
CRAWFORD Anwen
CRISP Tracy
CROFT Julian
CROGGON Alison
CRONIN M T C
CROOME Andrew
CROSS Roger
CROWLEY Peter
CROZIER J L
Cullen Richard
Cunningham, Michael
CUNNINGHAM, Sophie
Curiol Céline
CURTIN Amanda
CURTIN Penelope
CURTIN Tansy
CURTIS Lauren Aimee
Curzon Ellie
CUSACK John Bede
DA COSTA Suneeta Peres
DAISLEY Stephen
DALGARNO Paul
Dalziell Tanya
Damono Sapardi Djoko
DANALIS John
DANDO-COLLINS Stephen
Dangarembga Tsitsi
Dansereau Serge
DARK Eleanor
Darrieussecq Marie
Dasgupta Rana
Davey Janet
DAVIDOW Shelley
Davids Nadia
Davies Carys
DAVIES Julian
DAVIS Brooke
DAVIS Rhett
DAVIS Richard
DAVISON Graeme
DAVISON Liam
DAY Gregory
DAYLIGHT Tegan Bennett
De Botton Alain
De Courcy Anne
DE CRESPIGNY Robin
De Juan José Luis
De Kat Otto
DE KRETSER Michelle
De Lillo, Don
De Tessan Christina Henry
Dean Louise
Delacourt Gregoire
DELAHUNTY Mary
DELANEY Brigid
Delerm Philippe
DELLORA Daryl
DENNIS Richard
DEO Shastra
Deon Michel
Desai Kiran
DeSoto Lewis
DESSAIX Robert
DEVANNY Jean
DI PASTENA Ida
DIBBLE Brian
Dick Philip K
DICKIE Madelaine
Dimópulos Mariana
DISHER Garry
Divakaruni Chitra Banerjee
Djavadi Négar
Doctorow E.L.
DOHERTY Ben
DOHERTY Peter
Donoghue Emma
Dostoyevsky Fyodor
DOUGAN Lucy
Douglass Frederick
DOVEY Ceridwen
Dowlatabadi Mahmoud
DOWN Jennifer
DOWNES Stephen
Doyle Roddy
Drabble Margaret
Drakulić Slavenka
Dreiser Theodore
DREWE Robert
Drndic Dasa
DRUMMOND Sarah
Du Maurier Daphne
DUCKOR-JONES Avi
DUGDALE Joan
DUIGAN Virginia
DUIGNAN Kate
Dunant Sarah
Duncan David James
DUNCAN Peter
Dunlop Tessa
Dunmore Helen
Dunnett Dorothy
Duras Marguerite
Dusapin Elisa Shua
DUTTON Geoffrey
EAGLE Chester
Eaglestone Robert
Ebershoff, David
ECKERMANN Ali Cobby
Eco Umberto
EDESON Robert
EDGAR Patricia
EDGAR Stephen
Edge Arabella
Edgeworth Maria
EDMOND Martin
EDWARDS John
Eggers Dave
EIDELSON Meyer
Elderkin Susan
ELDERSHAW Flora
Eliot George
Eliseev Igor
ELLIOTT Ron
ELLIOTT Sumner Locke
Ellis Alice Thomas
ELSAOUD Maher Abou
ELVERY Laura
EMERSON Craig
Emezi Akwaeke
Endicott, Marina
ENG Tan Twan
ENGLISH Anthony
Enright Anne
Erdrich Louise
ESKINAZI Lisa
ESPESETH Amy
ETHERINGTON Bonnie
EVANS Patrick
Faber Michel
Fadanelli Guillermo
FALCONER Delia
Falcones Ildefonso
FALKINGER Richard
Fallada Hans
FARID Lily Yulianti
FARMER, Beverley
Farooqi Musharraf Ali
FARRAR Jill Martindale
FARRELL Fiona
Farrell J G
Farrell Joseph
FARRELL Michael
Faruqi Shamsur Rahman
FAULKNER Annah
Faulks Sebastian
FAVENC Ernest
FEALY Susan
FEARNLEY Laurence
Fearnley-Whittingstall Hugh
FEATHERSTONE Nigel
Feigel Lara
Fenkl Heinz Insu
FERGUS Lara
Ferrante Elena
Fforde Jasper
FIDLER Richard
FIELDING Helen
FIELKE Andrew
FIENBERG, Anna
FINDLAY Carly
Findley Timothy
Fitten Marc
FITZGERALD Deborah
Fitzgerald F. Scott
FITZGERALD Michael
FITZPATRICK Deb
Fitzpatrick Joanna
FLANAGAN Richard
Flaubert Gustave
FLETCHER Beryl
FLYNN Chris
Flynn Thomas R
FOGARTY Lionel
Ford Ford Madox
Forester C.S.
Forna Aminatta
FORNASIERO Jean
FORSTER Deborah
Forster Margaret
FOSTER David
FOXLEE Karen
FRAME Janet
Frankl Viktor E
FRANKLIN Miles
FRASCARELLI Carmine
Fraser Antonia
Fraser Malcolm
Frayn Michael
Freeman Hadley
FREEMAN Kimberley
Frenkel Francoise
Freud Esther
FREYNE Catherine
Fridlund Emily
FRITH Marion
Fry Stephen
Fuentes Carlos
Fullerton Alexander
FULLERTON Susannah
FULTON Margaret
FUNDER Anna
Gale, Patrick
Galgut Damon
GALL Jennifer
Galloway Steven
GAMMAGE Bill
GANDOLFO Enza
Ganeshananthan V V
Garcia Tristan
Gardam Jane
GARDINER Jo
GARDNER Paul
Gardos Peter
Garner Alan
GARNER Helen
Garnier Pascal
Gary Romain
GASCOIGNE John
Gaskell, Elizabeth
Gatore Gilbert
Gaudé Laurent
GAUNT Angus
GEE Maurice
GENDALL Susanna
GEORGE Denise
GEORGE Jonette
George Sara
Ghosh Amitav
GIANNOUKOS Tina
Gibbons Stella
Gifford Elisabeth
GILDFIND HC
GINIBI Ruby Langford
GINNANE Karen
Ginzburg Natalia
GIOVANNONI Moreno
GISLASON Kari
Gissing, George
Glasfurd Guinevere
GLOVER Dennis
GNANALINGAM Brannavan
GODDARD Emily
Godden Rumer
Goethe Johann Wolfgang von
Gogerty Clare
Gogol Nikolai
GOLDBLOOM Goldie
Golding William
GOLDS Cassandra
GOLDSMITH Andrea
Goldsmith Barbara
Goldsmith Oliver
GOLDSWORTHY Anna
GOLDSWORTHY Peter
Goncharov Ivan
GOODING Janda
Goodman Simon
GOODWIN Julie
Gordimer Nadine
GORDON Adam Lindsay
GORDON Sandy
GORTON Lisa
GOTT Robert
Grabowski Jan
GRACE Patricia
GRAHAM Jillian
GRAHAME Carmel Macdonald
Grant Linda
GRAVES Robert
GRAY Robert
GREEN Dr Jenny
Green Henry
GREEN Jonathan
Greene David
Greene Graham
Greene Richard
Greer Andrew Sean
GREER Germaine
GRENVILLE Kate
Griffiths Paul
GRIFFITHS Tom
Grigorenko Alexander
Grigson Geoffrey
GRIMSHAW Charlotte
GRIMWADE Stephen
Grishkovets Evgeny
Gromova Natalia
GROSE Peter
Grossman David
Grossman Vasily
Grushin Olga
GUEST Glenda
GUILHAUS Fred
GUINEAY Lana
Gunaratne Guy
Gunesekera Romesh
GUNN Mrs Aeneas
Gurnah Abdulrazak
Haasse Hella S
Habila Helon
Haenel Yannick
HAGEMANN Helen
HAGER Mandy
HAIGH Gideon
Hainsworth Peter
HALL Charles
Hall Louisa
HALL Rodney
HALL Sandra
HALLIGAN, Marion
HALLORAN Jacinta
HAM Rosalie
HAMER Julia
Hamid Mohsin
HAMILTON Clive
Hamilton-Paterson James
Hammett Dashiell
Hamsun Knut
HANCOCK James Gulliver
HANCOCK Susan
Handayani Eliza Vitri
Hanif Mohammed
Hankir Zahra
HANRAHAN Barbara
Hao Phan Thanh
HARARI Fiona
Haratischvili Nino
Harding Georgina
Harding Paul
Harding Thomas
Harman Claire
HARRIS Catherine
HARRIS Trish
HARRISON Craig
Harrison Rebecca
HARROWER Elizabeth
Harstad Johan
HARTIGAN Patrick
HARTLAND N G
HARTNETT Sonya
Hartsuyker Linnea
HASKINS Victoria
HAWKE Steve
Hawthorne Nathaniel
Hay Elizabeth
HAY Sheridan
HAYES Nicole
HAZZARD Shirley
Heaney Seamus
HEARST Elise Esther
HEATHCOTE Christopher
HEENAN Keren
HEISS Anita
Hemingway Ernest
HENDERSON Anne
HENDERSON Gus
HENLEY Lisa
HENNESSEY Rachel
HENRY Thalia
HENRY-JONES Eliza
HENSHAW Mark
Hensher Philip
HEPWORTH Sally
Heraty Toeti
HERBERT Xavier
HEREAKA Whiti
HERGENHAN Laurie
Hermann Judith
HERRICK Steven
Hertmans Stefan
Hertz Noreena
Herwig Malte
Hess Annette
Hesse Herman
HICKMAN Bronwen
HICKMAN Ellen
HIGHLEY Kerry
Highsmith Patricia
HILL Anthony
HILL Christine
HILL, David
Hill, Lawrence
HILLMAN Ken
HILLMAN Robert
Hilton James
Hirata Andrea
HISCOCK Geoff
HISKEY Garry
Hoay Kwee Tek
HOBBY Nathan
HODGMAN Helen
Hoffman, Eva
HOLLAND Patrick
HOLLAND-BATT Sarah
HOLLINGWORTH Robert
Hollywood Paul
Holmes à Court Simon
HOLMES Katie
HOLSWORTH Mark S
Holt Penelope J.
Holtby Winifred
HOOPER Chloe
HOOPER Matthew
HOOTON Matthew
HOPCRAFT Matthew
HOPKINS Lekkie
Hornby Simonetta Agnello
HORNE Donald
HORNER David
HORNUNG Eva
HORTLE Erin
HOSKINS Ian
HOSPITAL Janette Turner
Hosseini Khalid
HOTERE Andrea
HOUBEIN Lolo
Houellebecq Michel
Howard Elizabeth Jane
HOWARD Matt
HOWELL Adriane
HOWELL Simmone
Huggan Isabel
HUGGINS Jackie
Hughes Caoillinn
HUGHES John
HUGHES Robert
Hugo Victor
Humbert, Agnes
HUME Fergus
HUNGERFORD T A G
HUNT Allanah
HUNTLEY Rebecca
HURST Cameron
Hurston Zora Neale
Hutchinson Ben
HUTCHINSON Garrie
Hutton Robert
Huxley Aldous
HYLTON Jane
IENG Sovannora
IHIMAERA Witi
ILANBEY Sumeyya
INGLESE Hilda and Laurie
Inoue Yasushi
Irani Anosh
IRELAND David
Irving Washington
ISAACS Robert
ISEMONGER Holly
Ishiguro, Kazuo
ISSA Mariam
Izzidien Ruqaya
JACH Antoni
JACKSON Anna
Jackson Jeffrey H
Jacobs Emma
JACOBSON Anna
JAGOSE Annamarie
JAIRETH Subhash
JAIVIN Linda
JAMES Andrea
JAMES Rodney
JANKE Terri
JANSON Julie
JANSSON Tove
JARRO Ngaire
Jaswal Balli Kaur
JEBB Mary Anne
Jedrowski Tomasz
JEFFERIS Barbara
Jelinek, Elfriede
Jenkins Robin
Jennings Karen
JENNINGS Kate
JENSEN Erik
Jhabvala Ruth Prawer
JOEL Maggie
Johnson B.S.
JOHNSON Katherine
JOHNSON Susan
JOHNSON Sylvia
JOHNSTON Dorothy
Johnston Jennifer
JOHNSTON Michelle
JOHNSTON, George
JOLLEY Elizabeth
Jones Cherie
JONES Jennifer
Jones Kathleen
JONES Lloyd
JONES Myfanwy
Jones Nerys
JONES Philip
JONES Portland
JONES S A (Sarah)
JONES Sally-Ann
JONSBERG Barry
JOOSTEN Melanie
JORDAN Toni
JORGENSEN Lesley
JOSE Nicholas
Joseph Anjali
Joyce James
Joyce Rachel
JUCHAU Mireille
JUERS Evelyn
JURGENSEN Manfred
Kadare Ismail
Kadish Rachel
Kafka Franz
KAMINSKY Leah
KAMLER Barbara
KANDELAARS Deb
KARAKALTSAS S C
KARALIS Vrasidas
Karunatilaka Shehan
KATZEN Hayley
Katzen Mollie
Kaul Aashish
Kawakami Hiromi
Kay Francesca
KEARNEY Christine
KEATING Paul
Keefer Kyle
Keegan Claire
KEELER Chris
KEFALA Antigone
Kehlmann Daniel
KELL Katrina
Keller Helen
KELLS Stuart
Kelly Catriona
Kelman James
Kemp Martin
Kempowski Walter
KENEALLY Thomas (Tom)
Kennedy A L
KENNEDY Cate
KENNY Robert
KENT Hannah
KENT Jacqueline
Kertész, Imre
Keun Irmgard
Khadra Yasmina
Khakpour Porochista
Khalifa Khaled
Khemlin Margarita
Khumalo Fred
Khvoshchinskaya Sofia
Kiberd Declan
KIDMAN Fiona
Kilanko Yejide
Kingsley Charles
KINNANE Garry
KINNANE Stephen
KINSELLA John
Kipling Rudyard
KISSANE Andy
Klein Daniel
Knausgaard Karl Ove
KNEEN Krissy
Knight Sabina
Knowles John
KNOX Malcolm
KNYVETT R. Hugh
KOCH Christopher
Koch Herman
KOENIG Cheryl
KOHLER Alan
KORNBLATT Joyce
Koscec Marinko
KOVAL Ramona
KRASNOSTEIN Sarah
Kratochvil Jiri
KRAUTH Kirsten
Kreitman Esther Singer
KRUCKEMEYER Finegan
KRUIMINK K M (Kate)
Krznaric Roman
KUIPER Elizabeth
Kureishi Hanif
Kurniawan Eka
KWAYMULLINA Ambelin
KWAYMULLINA Ezekiel
KWON Silvia
KWONG Andrew
KWONG Kylie
Kyomuhendo Goretti
La Guma Alex
LA NAUZE Robert
LABRUM Bronwyn
LAGUNA Sofie
Lahiri Jhumpa
LAKE Marilyn
LAMB Matthew
Lambert Shaena
LAMOND Julieanne
Lampedusa Guiseppe Tomasi di
LANAGAN Margo
LANCASTER Rosemary
LANDSMAN Lexi
LANE William
LANG Steven
LANGFORD-GINIBI Ruby
Langley Lee
LANGTON Marcia
Lannister Jammy
Lapierre Alexandra
LARKIN John
Larrington Caroline
LAU Jamie Marina
Laurence Margaret
LAVERICK Sarah
LAW Benjamin
LAWSON Henry
LAWSON Mary
LAWSON Valerie
Lazarevska Alma
LAZAROO Simone
Lévy Bernard-Henri
Le Carre John
Le Chanu Patrick
Le Clezio J M G
Le Guin Ursula
LE HUNTE Bem
Lea Caroline
LEANE Jeanine
LEARY Rachel
Leblanc Maurice
Leduc Violette
LEE Geum-yi
Lee Janice YK
Lee Lily Xiao Hong
LEE Micheline
LEES Adam C
LEES Pattie
LEFEVRE Carol
Lefteri Christy
LEHMANN Geoffrey
LEIGH Andrew
LEIGH Julia
Lemaitre Pierre
LEMON Andrew
Lennox Charlotte
LEONHARDT Lynne
Lernet-Holenia Alexander
Leroux Gaston
LESTER Natasha
LESTER Yami
Levy Deborah
Levy Tatiana Salem
LEW Henry R
Lewis Damien
LEWIS Helen
LEWIS Julie
Lewis Sinclair
Lewycka Marina
LIBERMAN Serge
LIMPRECHT Eleanor
LINDSAY Joan
Lipstadt Deborah E
Lively Penelope
Llop Jose Carlos
Lloret Bruno
LOBB Joshua
Lodge David
Loh Christine
LOHREY Amanda
London Jack
LONDON Joan
Lorca Federico Garcia
LORENZO Olga
LOVEDAY Gert
Lovett Charlie
LOWE Robert
Loy Rosetta
LOYOLA Roman
LUCASHENKO Melissa
LUDWICK Harold
LUI Nakkiah
Luiselli Valeria
Lukacs John
LUKINS Robert
LUMBY Catharine
Lurie Alison
LURIE Morris
Lyons John D
LYONS-LEE Belinda
Macaulay Rose
MACAULEY Wayne
MACCALLUM Mungo
MACCARTER Kent
MACCOLL Mary-Rose
MACDONALD Anna
MACHERAS Chris
MACINNIS Peter
MACK Louise
MACKAY Hugh
MACKENZIE Jennifer
MACKINNON A.J.
MACKLIN Robert
MacLaverty Bernard
MACRIS Anthony
MAGAN Magan
MAGAREY Susan
Magee Audrey
MAGUIRE Emily
Maine Sarah
Mair Victor H
Mairal Pedro
MAKERETI Tina
Makine Andreï
Makkai Rebecca
MAKKLER Irris
MALEZER Rosie
MALONEY Shane
MALOUF David
MANAWATU Becky
Mandela Nelson
MANDOKI Anna
Mann Thomas
MANNE Robert
MANNING Frederic
MANNING Melissa
MANSFIELD, Katherine
Mantel Hilary
Marahimin Ismail
Marais Javier
Marani Diego
Marcus Laura
MARNER Annette
MARSHALL Alan
MARSHALL Owen
Martel Yann
MARTIN Susan K
Martin Valerie
Martinez Gabi
Martinez Virgilio
Mashigo Mohale
MASTERS Olga
Matar Hisham
MATHERS Peter
MATHEWS Iola
Mathiane Nomavenda
MATTHEWS Amy T
MATTHEWS Rachel
MATTHEWSON Paula
MATTINGLEY Christobel
Maugham Somerset W.
Maupassant Guy de
Mawer Simon
MAWSON Douglas
MAYNARD John
MAYOR Thomas
MAZZA Donna
McCALMAN Janet
McCann Colum
McCARTHY Maureen
McCAUGHEY Patrick
McCLELLAND Roanna
MCCONNELL Peter
McCOOEY David
McCormack Mike
McCourt Frank
McCoy Sarah
McCrae Gavin
McCULLOCH Alan
MCCULLOCH CHILDS Emily
MCCULLOCH Susan
MCDEVITT Katy
McDONALD Meme
MCDONALD Roger
McEACHERN Doug
McFARLANE David
MCFARLANE Fiona
MCGAHAN Andrew
McGahern John
MCGREGOR Alasdair
MCGREGOR Fiona Kelly
Mcgregor Jon
McGREGOR Russell
McGUIRE Magdalena
McKAY Laura Jean
MCKELVEY Ben
MCKENNA Mark
McKenna Thomas
McKenzie Alecia
McKINNON Catherine
McKISSOCK Diane
McKISSOCK Mal
MCLAREN Jack
McLAREN Philip
MCMAHON L P
McMANUS Sally
McMillan George
McMULLEN Ross
MCPHEE Hilary
MCPHERSON Sue
McWatt Tessa
MEAD Rachael
MEAKINS Felicity
MEANY Helen
MEARS Gillian
Medie Peace Adzo
MEEHAN Michael
MEGALOGENIS George
Melrose Fiona
Melville Herman
Melvin Sheila
Mengiste Maaza
Meredith George
MEREDITH Gwen
MERRILEES Margaret
MESSER Jane
Messud Claire
MEXTED Kathy
MEYER Angela
Michaels Anne
MIDALIA Susan
MIDDLETON Murray
Mihardja Achdiat K
MILLER Alex
Miller Andrew
Miller Laura
Miller Madeline
MILLER Patti
MILLER Steven
MILLETT Peter
MILLS Jennifer
Mills Sam and Cuell Thom editors
Mingarelli Hubert
Minoui Delphine
MINTER Peter
MIRMOHAMADI Kylie
Mishra Pankai
MITCHELL Adrian
Mitchell David
Mitford Nancy
Modiano Patrick
MODJESKA Drusilla
Moggach Deborah
Molesini Andrea
Molina Antonio Munoz
MOLONEY James
MONTEATH Peter
Moore Brian
MOORE Nicole
Moore Wayetu
MOORE-GILBERT Kylie
Moorehead Caroline
MOORHOUSE Frank
Morandini Claudio
Moravia Alberto
MORE Thomas
MOREY Kelly Ana
MORGAN Andrew
MORGAN Sally
MORIARTY Jaclyn
MORIARTY Ros
Morpurgo Michael
Morrall Clare
MORRELL Timothy
MORRIS Heather
MORRIS Paula
Morrison Toni
MORRISON Zoë
MORSI Mohammed Massoud
Mortimer Penelope
Moser David
Mozley Fiona
Msimang Sisonke
MUDROOROO a.k.a. JOHNSON Colin
Mujila Mwanza Fiston
Mukasonga Scholastique
Muller Herta
MULREADY Rose
MULVANY Kate
Munaweera Nayomi
MUNDAY Bruce
MUNDELL, Meg
MUNDY Robyn
MUNKARA Marie
Munmuir Wyl
MUNRO Craig
Murakami Haruki
Murari Timeri N
Murdoch Iris
MURGATROYD Sarah
MURNANE Gerald
MURPHY Kate
MURPHY Katharine
MURPHY Lois
MURPHY Rashida
MURPHY Ruairi
Murray Paul
MURRAY Ruby J
MURRAY-SMITH Joanna
MUSGRAVE David
MUSHITA Lucy
MYLES Sarah
Mytting Lars
Naipaul V.S.
NANNI Giordano
NAPIER Kali
Narayan R K
Narrators A-Z
Naydan Michael M
Ndebele Njabulo
NEALE Margo
NEIDJIE Bill
NELSON Alice
NELSON Brian
Nemirovsky Irene
Nesbit Edith
Nettel Guadalupe
Neuman Andres
Neville Peter
NEVILLE Richard
NEWTON Nerida
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Nguyen Viet Thanh
Ngũgĩ Wanjikũ Wa
NIALL Brenda
Nicholls David
Nielsen Susin
NIKULINSKY Alex
NIKULINSKY Philippa
NILAND D'Arcy
Noble Barbara
NORMA Caroline
Norman Elizabeth M
Norman Michael
Northrop Solomon
NOWRA Louis
Nudanu Celestine
Nwabineli Onyi
Nwaubani Adaobi Tricia
O'BRIEN Charmaine
O'Brien Edna
O'Brien Flann
O'CONNELL Deirdre
O'CONNER Elizabeth
O'Connor Joseph
O'Connor Nuala
O'CONOR Juliet
O'FLYNN Mark
O'GRADY Emily
O'KEEFFE Angela
O'NEIL Clare
O'Neill Mark
O'NEILL Ryan
O'REILLY P A (Paddy)
O'Shaughnessy Kathy
O'SULLIVAN Vincent
OAKLEY Barry
O’BRIAN Patrick
O’Brien Tim
Oberski Jona
Obioma Chigozie
Oe Kenzaburo
Offill Jenny
Okereke Chioma
Olafsdottir Auour Ava
OLLER Narcis
Olmi Veronique
OLSEN Penny
OLSSON Kristina
OLSSON Linda
Omotoso Yewande
Ondaatje Michael
Onuzo Chibundu
OOCHUNYNG Fiona Wirrer-George
Op de Haar Arnold Jansen
Orange Tommy
ORCHARD Sonia
ORR Stephen
Orwell George
OSBORNE G.L. (Glenys)
OTTO Kristin
Ottolenghi Yotam
OUSTON Adam
OWEN Professor Earl
Oyeyemi Helen
PAHEER Para
PAISLEY Fiona
PAJALIC Amra
Palma Felix J
PALMER Nettie
PALMER Vance
Pamuk Orhan
Pane Armijn
Pant Monika
Papadiamantis Alexandros
PAPAS Maria
PARKER-CHAN Shelley
Parmar Priya
PARRETT Favel
PARRITT Sue
PASCOE Bruce
Pasternak, Boris
PATERSON A B (Banjo)
PATTERSON, Diana
PAULL Emily
Pavlova Karolina
PEARLMAN Jonathan
Peixoto Jose Luis
Perec Georges
Pergaud Louis
PERICIC Marija
PERKINS Emily
PERLMAN, Elliot
Perreault Annie
Perry Sarah
PERSHALL Mary K
Pessoa Fernando
Petit Caroline
Petterson Per
Picardie Justine
Pickering Outi
Picoult Jodi
PIEPER Liam
PIERCE Nell
PIERCE Peter
PIKE Deborah
Pilch Jerzy
Pinker Steven
PIPER Christine
PIPER Sally
Pisani Elizabeth
Plath Sylvia
Platzova Magdalena
Poe Edgar Allan
POLAIN Marcella
POLITES Peter
Politycki Matthias
Polyakova Olga A
PORTER Jennifer
PORTER June
Pouncey Peter
Powell Anthony
POWELL Judy
POWELL Nicholas
POWER Robert
Prentice Dale
Prescott Lara
PRESCOTT Shaun
PRESLAND Gary
PRESSER Bram
PRESTON Edwina
PRICHARD Katharine Susannah
Prilepin Zakhar
PROBERT Belinda
PROUDFOOT Julie
Proust Marcel
PRYOR Monty Boori
Puenzo Lucía
PULLIN Ruth
Pullman Philip
PURCELL Leah
Pushkin Alexander
Pyetsukh Vyacheslav
QUIGLEY Sarah
Quimper Charles
RABALAIS Kevin
Radcliffe, Ann
RADOK Stephanie
Rahimi Atiq
RAJA Christopher
RANDALL, Charlotte
Rappaport Helen
RASER-ROWLAND Annie
RAWSON Jane
RAYNES Cameron
RAYSON Hannie
REECE-LANE, Lisa
REED-GILBERT Kerry
REEDER Stephanie Owen
REES Dymphna Stella
REID Anthony
Reimann Brigitte
REIST Melinda Tankard
RENDLE-SHORT Francesca
REYNOLDS Henry
Reynolds Matthew
RICHARDS Eirlys
RICHARDS Kate
Richardson Dorothy
RICHARDSON Henry Handel
RICHARDSON Raeden
RICHARDSON Tamzyne
Rilke Rainer Maria
RINGL:AND Holly
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Book Summary and Reviews of The Golden Age by Joan London

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

The Golden Age

by Joan London

Critics' Consensus ( 4 ) :
Genre: Historical Fiction
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About this book

Book summary.

Winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's Award for Fiction Joan London, author of Gilgamesh , gives her readers an immensely satisfying and generous-hearted story about displacement, recovery, resilience, and love with The Golden Age .

Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold's family, Hungarian Jews, escape the perils of World War II to the safety of Australia in the 1940s. But not long after their arrival Frank is diagnosed with polio. He is sent to a sprawling children's hospital called The Golden Age, where he meets Elsa, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, a girl who radiates pure light. Frank and Elsa fall in love, fueling one another's rehabilitation, facing the perils of polio and adolescence hand in hand, and scandalizing the prudish staff of The Golden Age. Meanwhile, Frank and Elsa's parents must cope with their changing realities. Elsa's mother Margaret, who has given up everything to be a perfect mother, must reconcile her hopes and dreams with her daughter's sickness. Frank's parents, transplants to Australia from a war-torn Europe, are isolated newcomers in a country that they do not love and that does not seem to love them. Frank's mother Ida, a renowned pianist in Hungary, refuses to allow the western deserts of Australia to become her home. But her husband, Meyer, slowly begins to free himself from the past and integrate into a new society. With tenderness and humor, The Golden Age tells a deeply moving story about illness and recovery. It is a book about learning to navigate the unfamiliar, about embracing music, poetry, death, and, most importantly, life.

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Reader reviews.

Awards for The Golden Age : 2015 Patrick White Literary Award 2015 Kibble Literary Award Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction New South Wales Premier's People's Choice Award "Starred Review. The novel was a recipient of multiple awards in London's native Australia, and deservedly so: it is pretty much perfect." - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. Her writing is cleareyed, generous-hearted, never sentimental... every character, however minor, comes to life in these pages. Like her fictional pianist, London is a virtuoso." - Kirkus " The Golden Age serenely affirms the goodness in people and the divinity of the connections between them." - The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) " The Golden Age is London's most accomplished and keenly felt work to date...her affection for her characters may be contagious." - The Australian (Australia) "A brilliant display of life and change: the transition between war and peace, between love and permission, between terrible paralysis of various kinds and movement." - The Monthly (Australia) " The Golden Age carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become." - Sydney Review of Books (Australia)

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Author Information

Joan london.

Joan London is a bookseller and author living in Perth. She is the author of two short story collections, Sister Ships , which won The Age Book of the Year award, and Letter to Constantine , which won the Steele Rudd Award as well as the West Australian Premier's Award for Fiction, and three novels, Gilgamesh , The Good Parents , and The Golden Age .

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Book Review
The Golden Age by Joan London
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Amazon.com: The Golden Age: A Novel: 9781609453329: London, Joan: Books

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COMMENTS

Fully present, utterly connected: The Golden Age by Joan London
Joan London's The Golden Age is this kind of book, and as I have learned in these last months of reading, she is this kind of writer. The best word that I can come up with to describe London's voice is mature , which has not much to do with the author's age, and everything to do with her skill.
THE GOLDEN AGE
Award-winning Australian author London (The Good Parents, 2008, etc.) illuminates lives touched by polio and World War II in her third novel, set in a convalescent home in Perth.A children's polio clinic called The Golden Age serves as the book's focus. Beside it stands the Netting Factory, operating noisily day and night.
The Golden Age: A Novel
The Golden Age by Joan London Published by Europa Editions Publication date: August 16th 2016 Joan London's The Golden Age is a quiet novel about a frightening time in the 1950s when, instead of fun and freedom, summer came to mean fear and isolation as pools were closed and children kept inside the house in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded polio.The Golden Age is a convalescent home in ...
The Golden Age review: A tough, intelligent story of displacement
Joan London's characters attempt to shape a communal present as Australia absorbs the effects of the polio epidemic that terrorised parents in the 1950s ... The Golden Age review: A tough ...
Book Review: The Golden Age by Joan London
Review: Set in the 1950's, The Golden Years by Joan London is a novel of displacement and longing, where people are pulled between their need to connect and their knowledge that they are ultimately alone in the world. The Gold family are survivors; through the ravages of war-torn Hungary, they have survived, 'cellars, ceilings, bombing, near starvation' and have found a new life in ...
BOOK REVIEW: The Golden Age by Joan London (Review by ...
The Golden Age becomes the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death, and poetry. Where children must learn that they are alone, even within their families. Written in Joan London's customary clear-eyed prose, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep connection. It is a ...
Book Review
The Golden Age is a Perth convalescent hospital for children recovering from poliomyelitis. Under the care of dedicated nurses and physiotherapists, the children are taught to use their limbs again and to gain the independence necessary for their return to the outside world. ... Book Review - The Golden Age by Joan London. July 4, 2017 April ...
Review: 'The Golden Age,' by Joan London
The title of Joan London's book "The Golden Age" refers not to an era but to a children's polio convalescent home in Perth, Australia. Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold has needed a wheelchair since he ...
The Golden Age (2014), by Joan London
Wrong place. Wrong era. A young man of that age has no relevance whatsoever to what's in the book. Joan London deserves better. There's an illuminating interview at the SMH and Geordie Williamson reviewed it for The Australian. ©Lisa Hill. Author: Joan London Title: The Golden Age Random House, 2014 ISBN:9781741666441
Book Summary and Reviews of The Golden Age by Joan London
Winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's Award for Fiction Joan London, author of Gilgamesh, gives her readers an immensely satisfying and generous-hearted story about displacement, recovery, resilience, and love with The Golden Age.. Thirteen-year-old Frank Gold's family, Hungarian Jews, escape the perils of World War II to the safety of Australia in the 1940s.