The Golden Age
by Joan London
copyright 2014
part read July 2016
rated 6/10: read to pass the time
The Premier's Book Awards are back. After a one year budget cut, Western Australia will again give a prize for a book. I have no idea of the entry rules but I decided that I would read some of the top ten entries.
The Golden Age is available online. Quick and easy to get a copy. So it is the first to be read. Or, at least, the first that I have started to read.
My first thought is, Is there an Australian author who can write about the present? Or do they all live in the past, and that is all they can understand and write about. Or, perhaps, Australian authors believe that that is all that readers want to read: the golden age of mid last century. I was there. I don't need to read about it.
My next thought is, is there a source of drama other than the Holocaust? What's that rule, where as soon as someone makes a comparison to Nazi Germany the conversation may as well end? Still, I read on...
I read on, and wonder what is happening.
The story wanders and rambles. Jumps backwards and forwards. Is laden with deeply philosophical statements such as, "In moonlight, you become another self. Alone in a mystery." Mysterious claptrap.
The story appears to be about a boy with polio. (Yes, more nostalgia for the good old diseases of the last century.) He appears to be about to fall in love with a girl with polio. I read a chapter about a nurse...
The nurse's chapter -- like the rest of the book -- wanders and rambles. I'm being given some insight into a character who ... well, who has nothing to do with the plot of this book. As far as I can tell. Perhaps it's included because the main characters are too young to be in a sex scene.
I stop reading.
Usually, at the top of my reviews, I categorise the book. I pick a genre. This book? No idea. It's a view of several rather boring characters, their minds and thoughts and histories. None are interesting enough for me to want to learn more about them. What I have read so far is vaguely interesting, mostly depressing.
Here's a thought: the genre is "fantasy". And at the end -- which I have not read -- the various characters will, in the mystic moonlight, all become fairies and drift off to live at the bottom of Norm's garden. Ooooohhh.
Yes, I rate it as readable, to pass the time. It's harmless. It's also meaningless. And, a third of the way through, it's going nowhere. Nowhere of interest to me, anyway.
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Dr Nick Lethbridge / Agamedes Consulting
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"Don't take life so seriously. It isn't permanent." … Tibetan philosophy
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