The Golden Age Joan London Vintage 9781741666441 In the middle of Joan London's latest novel, Meyer Gold ironically wonders to himself if there is a poet living in the eponymous polio hospital in Leederville, never realising that there is in fact a poet, and it happens to be Meyer's son Frank (or Ferenc in his native Hungarian.) Poetry becomes a central theme in the novel as it does in young Frank Gold's life; the quest for that illusive final line is a metaphor for a sort of quest for meaning in the life of a young person who has made his way by surviving horrors, first under the Nazis, where as a Jewish person he was forced to hide in the roof above the home of a moribund piano teacher and then in his new home of Perth, where he contracts polio and must learn to walk again. The novel is not, as one might suspect, the harrowing journey to Frank's recovery from illness, but rather his life despite it and because of it. His foray into The Golden Age hospital has ...
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