Other editions of book The Golden Age

Frank Gold is almost 13, and although he is small for his age he is independent, resourceful, a bit of a liar, indifferent to rules; he has also been struck down by polio. His curiosity sustains him. When he is moved to the Golden Age, a children’s hospital, to recuperate, he soon asserts his detachment. Before that, when he first became ill, he had been sent to a large hospital on the outskirts of Perth. Most of the patients there were young single adults; he was the youngest. Whizzing about in his wheelchair, he chased nurses and carried messages. He was, for a while, “mascot, cupid, little brother”. Somehow during all this activity he also “felt a hunger to know why he was alive”. Frank is no ordinary boy, and he knows it.An older boy, also a patient, detects the energy that sets Frank apart. Sullivan is a poet; he is writing a poem at the moment that he and Frank meet. Frank thinks that this is wonderful, yet, noticing that Sullivan has neither pen nor paper, challenges him. The older boy announces that he writes in his head; when asked about the title of his poem, he replies: The Snowfield. This confuses Frank, previously Ferenc, the son of cultured, chain-smoking Hungarian Jews, who have fled Europe and remain bemused by Australians. Why would anyone in Australia write about snow, he asks. Sullivan, wry and doomed, encased in an iron lung, explains that he is writing a poem about a ceiling.Their chance exchange leads to a friendship and one of many memorable sequences in Joan London’s beautiful, assured third novel, which is about displacement in its various guises. There is no sentimentality; instead she is concerned with understated emotion as well as the festering anger and shadows that cling to people. London, an accomplished short-story writer, has been compared with Alice Munro, yet her cool, deceptively architectural methodology may place her closer to Marilynne Robinson, with discreet echoes of Patrick White.This is a brilliant novel, astute and deliberate, almost brisk, if always human, rather like one of the several remarkable characters, Sister Olive Penny, lonely widow and mother of one adult child who had opted to live with an ordinary family and left her. As matron, she runs the Golden Age with genuine love and attempts to create a liberal home that will both appeal to the children who miss their families and also entice those, such as the cynical Frank, who have never previously experienced the ordinary.Olive Penny is a strange, heroic character reflecting London’s achievement in a novel that will resonate in the imagination for many reasons.Every character has his or her personal dreams, fears and regrets. Above all there is memory. For young Frank there is his time in hiding in Budapest, living in the care of his mother, Ida, music teacher. Fierce and unforgiving, she had been destined for a career as a concert pianist before the war changed all of that. The boy’s father, handsome, easygoing Meyer, is different. Having experienced a labour camp, the former businessman, who is now a truck driver, is happy to be alive – “Generally he left nostalgia to Ida. The past did not deserve it” – although he is restless and increasingly detached from his wife. Ida is a convincing study of a frustrated artist reduced to working for a milliner. For her Europe is the war, but it was also where her talent had been admired, briefly.The main story takes place as Australia absorbs the effects of the polio epidemic that terrorised parents in the 1950s. After some doubt a royal visit by the young Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by “her upright, hard-faced soldier prince”, goes ahead. The mid-1950s Australia that London evokes is one she just about remembers from her childhood; she was born in 1948. Her confident feel for the period makes the book live off the page.

Imagine The Wind in the Willows with real children in place of Kenneth Grahame’s storybook animals, and you’ll get a picture of The Golden Age. Thoughtful short stories about five endearing and creative siblings growing up in late Victorian England, the charming vignettes gently probe differences between children’s and adults’ perceptions of the world. Grahame’s enchanting reminiscences and inventions, based in part on his own Victorian childhood, are enhanced by the delightful illustrations of renowned American artist Maxfield Parrish. This book, and its companion Dream Days, remain beguiling today. While their language is sophisticated, confident reader of ten and up might easily find themselves caught in the web of story the author weaves; older readers have no excuse not to revel in these marvelous volumes.

Have you pored over The Wind in The Willows? If you have, then you will also love and enjoy reading The Golden Age. In this story of memories by Kenneth Grahame, the dearly loved originator of Winnie The Pooh, booklovers are gotten a chance to know the author’s life as a child. The introductory phrases of the Prologue give a heartbreaking memory of his younger days. At only 5 years old, his mother passed away due to giving birth to his sibling and his father who had a continuing dilemma with excessive drinking sent off his 4 kids, as well as the small child, to the guardianship of their grandmother in Berkshire. The sprawling hoary home was a fortune pile of channels and lofts, full of used stuffs and gave the kids with lots of enjoyment. Their uncle who was a clergyman in an adjacent town, always visited them to go boating and strolling in the near forests. These are the reminisces that are very delightfully captivated in Kenneth’s stories. Although he was intelligent in school, problems with money did not grant him to continue his studies in college. He decided to become a bank employee. His literary profession started rather in advance, with the print of short fiction in different periodicals at the age of 20. Kenneth Grahame was a Scottish novelist, renowned for The Wind in the Willows, a classic of tales for the young. He also penned The Reluctant Dragon, both stories were afterwards rendered into Disney movies, which are The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Reluctant Dragon. He is also known for these works: Pagan Papers in 1893; Dream Days in 1898 including The Reluctant Dragon in 1898; The Headswoman in 1898; The Wind in the Willows in 1908, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard; Bertie's Escapade in 1949, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Looking back to those days of old, ere the gate shut behind me, I can see now that to children with a proper equipment of parents these things would have worn a different aspect. But to those whose nearest were aunts and uncles, a special attitude of mind may be allowed. They treated us, indeed, with kindness enough as to the needs of the flesh, but after that with indifference (an indifference, as I recognise, the result of a certain stupidity), and therewith the commonplace conviction that your child is merely animal. At a very early age I remember realising in a quite impersonal and kindly way the existence of that stupidity, and its tremendous influence in the world; while there grew up in me, as in the parallel case of Caliban upon Setebos, a vague sense of a ruling power, wilful and freakish, and prone to the practice of vagaries—"just choosing so:" as, for instance, the giving of authority over us to these hopeless and incapable creatures, when it might far more reasonably have been given to ourselves over them. These elders, our betters by a trick of chance, commanded no respect, but only a certain blend of envy—of their good luck—and pity—for their inability to make use of it. Indeed, it was one of the most hopeless features in their character (when we troubled ourselves to waste a thought on them: which wasn't often) that, having absolute licence to indulge in the pleasures of life, they could get no good of it.