'I haven't shaken my fist at the moon.'
'I'm not here to be remembered. I'm here to be alive.'
Ian Dury
Joan London's wonderful novel 'The Golden Age' opens with this striking anecdote. The central
This striking turn of language and tone marks out something about the zest for life which marks out Joan London's character. It captures the powerful sense of the particularity of human experience which can be created in the best fiction, giving us some traction on how we might live our own particular humanity. This is the magic of the novel: a craft and art form which makes the real living people in our lives and in our wider world, seem so important, so alive, so worth celebrating with attentiveness.
It is a novel which depicts the concerns of the displacement and forced migration of vulnerable peoples seeking to escape oppression and conflict zones, in this case at the historical remove of post-Second World War period of Europe and Australia, centred round the Jewish Gold family. At the same time it represents powerfully the lives of children and their families affected by polio before its eradication after medical researcher Jonas Salk's vaccination breakthrough. The novel can be read as a direct response to the Australian 'stop the boats' policy of the 2013 Liberal-National coalition, following on from the previous Labour administration's no less harsh offshore processing policy (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-28189608).
Of course, there is no room for European smugness with the fear-mongering response of the media and politicians lack of humanitarian statesmanship in the face of mass migration from conflict zones coupled with the shameful existence of the Calais camp, particularly with its child migrants. In reflecting directly a migrant family's story, it asks us as readers and as people with a political voice, to sidestep some of the manipulative media misrepresentations of migrants, detaching us from their humanity, instead leading us to understand migrants as people with absolute human particularity, people we can welcome as we ourselves would wish to be welcomed in similar circumstances. Perhaps there is a direct link between these two powerful themes in the novel in the words of British punk artist, lyricist and polio victim, Ian Dury:
So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
And thank the creator you're not in the state I'm in
So long have I been languished
I must give all proceedings to myself.
Spasticus Autisticus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isXNVdguI8
And so to Joan London's vivid characters, whose stories carry these themes. Frank, the central character, is a thirteen year old boy who has survived life as part of the Hungarian Jewish community, part of it spent in hiding in the attic space of his mother's non-Jewish piano teacher, then being relocated with his mother and father from refugee accommodation in Vienna to the far flung colonial community of Perth. There he is struck down by polio in the epidemic of the early 1950s. Characters, events and personal experience are often seen through his eyes. Joan London creates an intense, unconventional, part-exile, part-new Australian boy, unable to be contained by the constraints and limitations of both polio and the colonial Australian society his family are trying to make their home within. He is at turns passionate, expressive, seeking to find his poetic vocation, while also being very much an adolescent boy with a burgeoning sense of attraction to the perhaps more conventional Australian fellow polio children's home resident Elsa. He possesses the strong vein of Jewish humour, dark as it comes, seen in his response to the more Anglo-Saxon Christianity Elsa has been brought up on: 'But I am not Christian.' She'd never thought of Jews not being Christian. Jesus was a Jew: 'And you know what happened to him.' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/27/the-best-of-old-jews-tell_n_1085089.html#gallery/196447/0 'The Golden Gate' residential home of the title is the burnished location of Frank and Elsa's relationship. From the bathroom door, Frank sees her foot, 'her ankle like a wishbone'. They share a growing intimacy, described in translucent language by London, echoing the language of Shakespeare's sonnets: 'She was his homing point, the place he returned to. His escape, his refuge. His park, his river, his track.' Frank, finds a resonant and multi-faceted poetic metaphor, 'The Third Country'. After his birthplace of Budapest is transformed into a country of terrors and he finds the refugee's place of safety, Perth, with its 'Australian sound' of 'emptiness' matching his mother's traumatised sense of displacement, he ends up at The Golden Gate polio residential children's home, which becomes the locus of love, 'the country he could finally feel at home'. Frank is the character we travel with most through the narrative.
Elsa is depicted as a character often through Frank's view, though London represents her in own right with her own independence. She is a self-contained, quite private character. As Frank is drawn to her, she is drawn to him, initially through his unconventional honesty and through his grasping of life in all its fullness outside the conventional Australian social perspective that as polio victims their life should be dictated by their victim status and social ostracism. Adolescent attraction draws them closer, though despite the bond she feels with him, this is not transposed into any sort of tidy romantic completion in an adult relationship. We are drawn to admire what is described as her 'internal' 'goodness' and her 'resoluteness'. She, the child, the polio victim, is stronger than her able bodied mother Margaret: 'she knew she only kept breathing because of her mother. So that her mother would not die.' This echoes the earlier character of Sullivan, Frank's poetic guide, who says of his parents: 'I refuse to be their only light. I want to be my own reason for living'. London considers the inevitable moral question of who survives and who does not, as Elsa considers how she has survived but an Irish Australian fellow victim has not, despite both being prayed for earnestly. Elsa is left with the sense that 'polio had taken her legs, made her pale with thin cheeks, yet somehow herself'.
And so from the two adolescent main characters to Frank's father, the once sophisticated Budapest businessman. Having operated an import-export business and survived European labour camps, he finds himself a delivery driver for Bickfords soft drinks firm. Seemingly unfamiliar through forced absence from his son, Frank, they are 'unalike in every way, yet with mutual goodwill had forged a bond, with no need to explain themselves'. His exaggeratedly accented self-mocking exclamations of 'vot da hell', bring warmth and lightness to those around him. Yet the scars of his experience as a European Jewish survivor remain, so that he finds himself unable to utter the social niceties of 'goodbye' or 'see you later' to anyone. In the indirectly expressed connection he forms with the unconventional Australian head nurse of The Golden Gate, Sister Olive Penny, it becomes apparent that 'he was beyond intimacy. The pretence of normality, the weight of the past.' Later in another encounter between them, 'she sensed for a moment the dense life inside him, all he'd loved and given up.' Migration, exile and displacement weigh heavily upon his character, with his 'suspicion that to love a place, to imagine yourself belonging to it, was a lie, a fiction. It was a vanity'. London portrays his uncertainty about West Australia with this vivid and fecund image: 'Budapest was the love of his life who had betrayed him. Perth was the flat-faced, wide-hipped country girl whom he'd been forced to take on as his wife. Only time would tell if one day he would reach across and take her hand.' He views the small, colonial mentality of West Australia of the 50s with sardonic detachment. The newly wed and crowned Queen Elizabeth's visit captures the sort of public health hysteria repeated in a later generation's ludicrous paranoia over AIDS. So the golden girl, the beloved film star style royal is protected from unclean hand contact with the public. Meyer sees this not just as health related snobbery, but as an enactment of the colonial mentality, referring to Perth as : 'a tiny lost tribe on the coast of a huge island, faithfully waiting for a ship from the Motherland'. Yet with increasing contact with The Golden Gate, such as the Christmas party he and wife Ida organise, he reflects: 'This is the community we belong to now ... with the humble of the earth. The halt and lame.' Perth and West Australia gradually insinuate themselves into his life: 'the roads here, the long steady run of them, the space and flatness soothed him. They suited the thinness of his spirit.' Gradually he accommodates himself out of displacement to this new place: 'what had been temporary had become settled with its own mysterious significance'. This is no welcoming open-armed new country, but represents instead the alignment to a new life which those forced into migration experience.
Ida, wife of Meyer and mother of Frank, is a more tense, febrile character. A concert pianist in Budapest, she reaches states of exalted melodramatic tension before performances, approaching practice with an exactitude that regards lack of rehearsal as a 'sin', in the run up to her first performance in Australia in the unexalted company of the children of The Golden Gate, their parents and the nurses. Yet she too, along with Meyer, is recognised by the unconventional Sister Penny, in her reflections before announcing her performance to the assembled company, for 'their sharp attentiveness, like witnesses', for 'the different way they saw things...their expectation of relating closely to you...their frankness'. Yet she is a character who lives vividly and with a prism of integrity for the reader, seen in her attitude to motherhood: 'motherhood never sat easily with Ida'. The scars of wartime survival are there in her view of 'the weak spot, the broken part; the gap that let the polio in'. She painfully recognises the bond between Frank and Meyer: 'his first smile, like hers, would always be directed towards Meyer.' Her dependence on Meyer is referred to through 'the necessity of being positive and optimistic when he was with Ida, as buoyant as a balloon that must keep them both aloft above some open sea that terrified her.' Yet there is a complexity about this relationship that is not reductive, not one way, not sentimental to the representations of migrant victims. So as he watches her practice for the Christmas concert, he notices her 'mind' and 'hands', 'the most moral, the most generous' part of her and she 'gave him back to himself', as he listened 'to a summation of all the tragedy and beauty of his life'.
Sister Olive Penny is another vivid character. Joan London creates a powerful sense of a character who resides outside the social norms of Australian 1950s women. Despite the social and physical ostracism of those with polio, Sister Penny welcomes Elsa to The Golden Gate, picking her up and carrying her without the sanitised plastic gloves of the other nurses. As a single woman, she, like the migrant Gold family, walks the edges of Australian conventions. In her occasional sexual liaisons with men, often married, such as Constable Ryan, 'she met them on the same terms as theirs'. She has protected and supported her daughter Elizabeth Ann, while at the same time recognising the way she is growing apart from her mother, settling into the bosom of the adopted Australian family she boards with, whose conventionality is the very antithesis of her mother's life. It is her lack of convention, the integrity beyond the timid Australian conventions of the 1950s which marks her out with such a strong sense of life. This is what draws Meyer to her, leaving the two of them teetering on the edge of deeper physical connections. Their most intimate conversations are delineated through London's portrayal of the language of the eyes: 'her eyes, dark with a secret life knowledge'. Behind the rituals of nurse carer and parent 'they recognised each other. There was a call between them, clear as a bird's'. At their final meeting at the beach, her eyes are significantly hidden behind sunglasses as Meyer says: 'I learnt from you...How to live here.' While it is clear that they will go no further, 'loss....like a seam running through her life' 'seemed to have been lifted, carried away in the sea wind.' So in the narrative's denouement, after the 'scandal', 'the revulsion' of Frank being found on top of Elsa, she responds to the home's governors' inquisition with: 'Children can surprise you by how much they feel and understand. How mature - emotionally - they really are'. Despite Frank's feeling that she has not stood up for him and Elsa, she knows she has in effect signed her own removal papers from The Golden Gate.
Towards the end of the narrative London creates an enthralling set piece at The Golden Gate, which allows her to portray the characters at their most vivid and the themes of displacement and disability at their most poignant. Frank's mother, the talented concert pianist, plays for the first time since her migration to this land, yet plays not to the grand cultured European audiences of before, but to the assembled children, parents, nurses and locals of The Golden Gate. Empathy for the outcast, for the rejected and inequitable life of life of an Australian young woman is represented in Nurse Ngaire's silent tears at the memory of her piano teaching mother who said she 'didn't have a musical bone in her body', ending up in this job after escaping her mother for romance only to be abandoned by the faithless man. The 'small white serious faces' of the children 'listened to every note'. Observing her passionate performance, Frank is drawn more closely to his mother: 'he saw her strength, her vast determination', putting him in mind of her 'fury' in the hospital for him to recover: 'they take the weak ones first'. Meyer's mind loses the notion that 'any one thing, person, country could be better than another'. Rodney Bennett, insufferable parent and small-minded societal snob, whose wife had previously said to her daughter about their invitation to a royal garden party: 'we thought, you know, with you being here, we'd be crossed off the list', is rebuffed in his boorish, bluff attempt to persuade Ida to play at his own garden party, so that he can achieve a social triumph. His attempt to give her 'a chance to get ahead. Especially members of her race' is rejected with elegant resoluteness by Ida who makes it clear that he could not afford the likes of musicians such as her. Ida finally achieves some sense of equilibrium: 'this was the land in which her life would take place. In which her music must grow. This was her audience, the emigres, the petit bourgeois, the nouveau riche, the country folk'.
And so to the novel's climax . Frank and Elsa are discovered in bed undressed atop each other and are expelled. The independent woman and remarkable nurse carer Sister Olive Penny is forced to move on. The Golden Gate's halcyon aura dissipates, not to be recovered by a clumsy meeting of Elsa and Frank's families. The coda offers no neat, resoundingly comfortable resolution in the face of disability and displacement. Elsa makes her life as a doctor with someone else. Frank, relocated to New York, living alone, is a poet with minor success, being poignantly interviewed by Elsa's literary son.
Joan London has written a book which is rich with character and life. Her prose has a fluent, gentle, restrained and unsentimental elegiac ease, yet is an apt vehicle for offering the reader 'light' and 'life'. Sent to me by my Australian aunt, a short search on the book in the British media is revealing by its absence of discussion. A minor reference appears on the Guardian website in relation to coverage of novels up for the Miles Franklin award for Australian fiction. The tax-avoiding Amazon stock it, but the tax-paying British online firm 'Hive' do not. This is a novel which deserves a global audience and opens the Eurocentric mind to the richness of Australian fiction. Let's leave the final words with John Ruskin, English artist and social thinker, whose work has featured in a recent exhibition in my home town of Sheffield:
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