Frank and Elsa draw closer together then they are to their families, sharing confidences and coming to an understanding that their futures will not be quite as they had planned. Elsa’s mother struggles with her strong-minded sister-in-law while her father is the one who visits Elsa. Frank’s parents came to Australia from a refugee camp in Vienna, both scarred by the war. Frank is a determined boy, zipping around the Golden Age in his wheelchair, wanting to know what’s going on and zeroing in on Elsa who, like him, is one of the oldest patients. He left the first shortly after the death of Sullivan, the eighteen-year-old who had shown him the way to what he is convinced is his vocation as a poet. Set in the years immediately before the discovery of an effective polio vaccination, London’s novel quietly and compassionately explores the far-reaching effects of this devastating illness.Ĭonverted from an old pub on the outer edge of suburban Perth, the Golden Age is Frank’s second rehabilitation home. He and Elsa are patients recovering from polio in a children’s convalescent home, both of them now shunned by society. Frank is the thirteen-year-old son of Jewish-Hungarian parents, refugees settled in 1950s Australia.

Both also share the theme which runs through The Golden Age: the plight of the outsider, or in this case, outsiders. Both Joan London’s previous novels – Gilgamesh and The Good Parents – stand out for me as fine examples of clean, elegant writing, free of unnecessary ornament.

The golden age by joan london