Joan London’s The Golden Age is written in the poetic language of love

JOAN London’s long-awaited new novel, The Golden Age, is unlikely in outline: a love story set in a real-life Perth polio clinic in the 1950s.

Joan London shows affection for her characters without resorting to sentiment. Picture: Rob Leeson

JOAN London’s long-awaited new novel, The Golden Age, is unlikely in outline: a love story set in a real-life Perth polio clinic in the 1950s, only years before Jonas Salk’s vaccine relieved us of the awful affliction of the virus. It describes a place hermetically sealed against a city fearful of contagion, its cast a secret society of the unwell.

So it is a measure of London’s deftness as a storyteller that the novel is also a universal meditation on nostalgia and hope, belonging and exile, love and loss, old world and new. Indeed, for a relatively short work it contains multitudes: narratives overlaid and assembled in such a way as to link disparate characters, milieus, generations, their respective fates imbricated like tiles on a roof. This sense of compression is aided by prose that often feels closer to poetry, that most direct of routes by which language gets to the truth of things.

Speaking of poetry, Plato, in Symposium, claims that “at the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet”. It is an idea London takes quite literally in these pages. Frank Gold, the shrewd and charming son of Jewish Hungarian emigres, has become, at 13, the oldest inhabitant of The Golden Age polio clinic. During the initial hospital treatment for his poliomyelitis, Frank befriended an older boy named Sullivan, an accomplished athlete and scholar absurdly banished to an iron lung. Frank was soon set to work, dictating the young man’s poems. On Sullivan’s sudden death, Frank inherits a doctor’s prescription pad containing those verses, along with the would-be poet’s vocation.

But it is love that drives Frank’s poetic efforts: love for his father, Meyer, a cosmopolitan businessman in his pre-war life in Budapest, now a melancholy isolate who drives a truck for a soft drink company; and for his mother, Ida, a gifted concert pianist who now works as a milliner’s assistant, immured in bitterness for what she has given up.

Mostly, though, Frank’s poetry is inspired by Elsa, another patient in the clinic. Frank feels that only she can understand his situation, his malady, his estrangement from the world, because she shares it with him. It is to her pure soul and ruined body that he is drawn.

The world that London summons in these pages soon exceeds a certain simplicity of plot. Third-person perspective allows her to track swiftly, cinematically, between characters. And yet such authorial attentions are so empathetic and minutely rendered in psychological terms, it is as if the novelistic intelligence has merged, momentarily, with its creation.

Whether with the clinic’s matron, Sister Olive Penny, a consummate professional and caring nurse who also takes lovers where and when she can, or young Albert Sutton, one of her wheelchair-bound charges who takes it into his head one night to escape home to his family, London enters into a startling and benevolent complicity:

The missing was worse than being sick. It filled his head, made him stupid, he couldn’t learn, couldn’t even speak. Deep down, all through himself, he knew that only when he went home would he get better. All he wanted was to open the front door and hear them say “Allo! ’Ere’s our Albert!”

In a situation ripe for false feeling and missteps — sick children, bereft parents, young love, Jewish wartime experience — London sounds not a single wrong note.

Her affection for her characters may be contagious, but it is hardly sentimental. The author is scrupulous in recording the tiny flaws in personality or paradoxes of feeling that quicken her characters into life.

The sense, for instance, that Elsa has of being fascinated by Frank and his assiduous courting, even of being haunted by him — all the while being unsure of the degree to which she actually likes the boy. Or the way in which Meyer and Frank’s loving relationship is shaped in part by exclusion:

They were unalike in every way, yet with mutual goodwill had formed a bond, with no need to explain themselves. Neither had ever hurt or bothered the other. Between them was a faint, unstated compact to protect themselves from Ida.

And it is fair to say that the complex domestic situation of Ida and Meyer is one of the saddest and most fascinating aspects of the book. The remaking of their lives in this plain and dusty antipodean city is in no way premised on past happiness, wealth, sophistication or success; in fact, it is a condition of acclimatisation that the past be let go. Ida seems incapable of jettisoning her early potential. But Meyer, shriven of so much during his time in a work camp during the war, gradually makes the place his own:

The velvety dusk, the lights appearing, the penciled clarity of roofs and trees. Softening, the city seemed more grown up, more itself, with its own mystery and potential. He was starting to see it differently, to look kindly upon it, as if, without knowing, bit by bit it had been taking shape for him. As if the disappointments and resentments had begun to evaporate into this silken air … A desert town, isolated, provincial, slowly gaining depth and shade, a mythic city too, in its own way.

It should not surprise readers that such exquisite recognition should be given to him as he acknowledges an attraction to one of the clinic’s nurses; all London’s characters are ennobled by love. For Frank, whose budding relationship comes to assume a central place in the story, love is “the third country’” — that nation of the heart through which the emigre must pass to make a home in the real.

No exegesis, however, can touch what is so special about The Golden Age. London’s virtues, like those of her great West Australian predecessor, Randolph Stow, recede to the degree that you insist too much on them.

The modesty and grace of her work should not be gainsaid, at least. Nor the ways in which the absolute honesty of her witness is modulated by a proper sense of care, even for imaginary women and men. She has already proven in novels such as Gilgamesh and The Good Parents to be our finest living writer of marriage and family life. The Golden Age burnishes these credentials: it is her most accomplished and keenly felt work to date. Every other book I read this year will seem loud and blatant beside it.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The Golden Age

By Joan London

Vintage, 256pp, $32.99