The Golden Age by Joan London
The Golden Age
by Joan London
U 50x66
Abraham Miller's review Nov 08, 2018 · edit
it was amazing
A remarkable novel about survival, transition, adaptation, and star-crossed love. Each character is honed to perfection. The central characters are transplanted Hungarian Jews, Holocaust survivors, facing their own individual problems in adapting to life on the barren plains of Perth, Australia. They come to terms with their lives in different ways. Meyer, the father, eventually embraces Australia and adapts. His wife, Ida a concert pianist in her former life, spurns Australia and resents having to play the Australian national anthem, which Meyer reminds her is now their anthem. Ida finds minor solace in resurrecting her role as a pianist, even if the audience is not what she would have experienced had her life in Hungary not been interrupted by the brutality of Nazi occupation and Hungarian fascism. The son, Frank, who survived the Holocaust as a child in hiding, is seized by polio and confined to a rehabilitation ward where he finds a soul mate in another patient, Elsa, and the warmth of budding adolescent love. The most dramatic impact on Frank and his transformation from child to young adult is an engagement with another patient who opens the world of poetry to him as a window into his own soul and an affirmation of his own sense of identity. There is an internal tension between Frank's bonding with Elsa and his desire to explore his art.
All of this is the obvious component of the story, but beneath the surface is another and equally powerful story of Sister Olive Penny, the head nurse, who in this reader's judgment is the sinew that holds the book together and a story that is powerful in its own right. Her life could have been smothered by the blanket of Anglo-Saxon puritanism, but her strength of character enables her to lead her own life on her own terms. Her sexual encounters dismiss the norms of her time and are neither great moments of passion nor the stuff of romance novels. They are a more realistic immersion in the human need to be touched, held, and loved and, however briefly, to bond with another.
The character of Sister Penny could only have been written by a woman with an internal gyroscope who shared and lived through similar experiences.
When human need requires breaking the rules of the Golden Age (the name of the polio hospital). it is Sister Penny who chooses to let people break them to let human need and emotion overcome bureaucratic restrictions. She does this repeatedly so that parents and children in crisis could console each other.
The Golden Age, its patients and staff are her family. She is immersed in it, more so than in her relationship with her own daughter. When she goes off to find comfort with a part-time lover, her instincts sense a crisis back at the Golden Age and hurl her racing back to the hospital to the rupture of sexual puritanism caused by two teenagers who were destined by any comprehension of human emotion to fall in the love.
Sister Penny would have handled this in the family, but her insipid assistant brings the episode to the attention of the board that instinctively must invoke the harsh punishment demanded by Anglo-Saxon puritanism which results in humiliating the teenagers and banishing them. Sister Penny must also be ostracized for the violation of sexual norms took place on her watch.
There is emotional tension between Meyer and Sister Penny, and it is a foreshadowing of love not to be fulfilled, not just for them but for Frank and Elsa.
In a work of moving, insightful, and truly gifted writing, nothing compares with the garden scene between Frank and Elsa. Frank realizes that his love for Elsa will devour him and as he recognizes it, Elsa instinctively "releases"--a well-chosen word--him from their embrace. Elsa understands that Frank will pursue his art as a solitary journey.
Frank never marries. His most memorable union is with an eight-year-old he takes in as a daughter. The relationship gives us a glimpse of Frank reacting to what might have been with Elsa.
Although Elsa is a perennial theme in his writing, she never answers his letters or comments on the books he sends her. The theme of unfulfilled love in the book is so deeply written about that the reader is left with the impression that this is an expression of the author's own life or someone whom she knew well. Maybe it was a sacrifice she once made for her own brilliant art.
Another compelling scene is that between Meyer and Sister Penny. It is reminiscent of something many have experienced, an encounter filled with potential love but one that required risk, embarrassment, perhaps even the prospect of shame to be fulfilled. A word not spoken, a step not taken. Is there anyone who cannot recall such an event? The author builds o it and make the emotions so vivid that we are standing next to the characters rather than reading about them.
As this theme permeates the very cells of the pages, I wonder if this is the author unraveling the tensions and contradictions of her own life and finding a modicum of resolution in the portrayal of the characters? At some level, Sister Penny is the conduit for the engagement of a variety of deep emotions crisply sharpened by an author of seemingly limitless talent in her ability to explore the contours and depths of the human condition.
$11.99 with 33 percent savings
Digital List Price: $17.99 
The Digital List Price is the suggested price provided by the publisher for the eBook format.
Learn more
Learn more
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
About the author
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2018
- Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2017
- Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2016
- Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2014
Top reviews from other countries
-
Rosetta BollettiReviewed in Italy on October 16, 2017
Il dramma della poliomielite
- The McBeansReviewed in Australia on July 7, 2020
Poetic evocation of another age in a familiar city
