Review: Golden Days
Reviewed by Angelique Kasmara
Author:
Caroline Barron
Publisher:
Affirm Press
ISBN:
9781922848383
Date published:
28 February 2023
Pages:
288
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$37.99
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In this novel of a friendship gone wrong, the 1990s’ central Auckland party scene lends a lively backdrop to the intense nine months that draws university students Becky and Zoe together, before all disintegrates in the wake of a tragedy.
Golden Days is Caroline Barron’s first fiction outing after her acclaimed memoir, Ripiro Beach. It opens with Becky on the receiving end of unwelcome information, signalling the end of her marriage. As a once-aspiring writer who put her own ambitions on hold to help grow husband Jono’s plumbing business, she’s left devastated. Then a letter arrives from Zoe, who she hasn’t spoken to for 17 years.
The letter is screwed up and tossed aside (though eventually retrieved), its tone and contents showing Zoe for the self-absorbed madam she is. However, at another point it’s noted that Becky’s parents named their daughter after Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and therein the first clue is dropped that a central tragedy is not all that seems.
The letter prompts Becky to cast back to the mid-1990s. These flashbacks flatten the present day into mere placeholder and it isn’t until we move further along the timeline that this framing device loses its awkwardness. It doesn’t help that Becky’s oldest friend Meg is never fully realised as a character; she simply remains a reliable and kind presence, even during the period that Becky regularly discards her like chewing gum on her shoe, in favour of Zoe’s more exciting company. However, when the past starts to catch up to the present, the narrative fair crackles along.
Becky herself is convincingly written, with all her quirks and contradictions. By turns clever but smug - 'None of the other girls in the top-stream class had a boyfriend', 'never quite fitted in with the geeks and chess-clubbers', insecure and unsure of her feelings but firm on her opinions. She’s also creative and bookish, influenced by novels such as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and this, coupled with her longing for a more interesting life, gives the reader fair indication of why she’s utterly mesmerised by Zoe.
Dodgy older men buy beautiful fine arts student Zoe drinks at nightclubs and she’s always able to get herself and Becky into 'cool' places. Her wont for spontaneously following guidance from her angel cards and that hokey bestseller The Celestine Prophecy gives them afternoons to remember, like the time they spend a sunny afternoon puffing joints on the beach with a hippy living in her van. These expansive explorations makes for excellent use of its set pieces, mostly notably a party in a Whatipū cave, where Barron’s strengths come to the fore. Echoes of ancient dancehall history when a rimu floor was built in the interior of the beach’s largest cave are drawn into these passages, there’s an evocative sense of time and place, eerie imagery, nail-chewing tension, clever characterisation and the acutely observed acceleration of Becky’s trajectory towards danger.
The seed of how our memories are skewed via our singular perspectives is scattered throughout but a big reveal is rendered through an artifice which jars and removes agency from one character, thus negating what could have been a more intriguing exploration on the subjectivity of memory. Also, the moment of this revelation is played out in dramatic fashion and although admirable in its ambition and vision, it’s hard to shake the sense that it may be at the expense of nuance and complexity, primarily because of the logic hoops another character has to jump through to rationalise the secrets they’ve kept.
Despite this, Golden Days is an affecting novel about memory, coming to terms with our past selves, and the walls we build when processing guilt and grief.
Reviewed by Angelique Kasmara
