The Golden Age

A polio hospital for children in Western Australia in the 1950s might not seem the most promising territory for a story of heart-catching beauty, but that's exactly what London's third novel is. I hate to crib from a publisher's blurb, but I can't improve on what Helen Garner calls it: "deeply benevolent." It's a story as sad as it is sweet, but there is a rare goodness to so many of the people within the hospital's walls, not least the two twelve-year-olds, the elders in this isolated society, who fall believably in love. With its wondrously exact language and its awareness of the bitterness of life alongside its beauty, The Golden Age reads like a minor-key companion to Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North.