The Greatest Show on Earth
The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald
Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo
Media hype surrounding the recently opened Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at New York City’s Discovery Center Times Square echoes the “Egypt-mania” coloring much of the 1970s. Viewing approximately 3,500-year-old Egyptian funerary art and artifacts displayed in a global tourist mecca is a bit unsettling but, in 21st-century America, anything might happen, including King Tut’s appearance at Disney World. In the 1970s some of the artifacts discovered in the 18th-century dynasty boy king’s tomb came West, once again since their discovery in 1922, first appearing at the British Museum in London for more than 1.6 million visitors.1 From there, the exhibit traveled to the former Soviet Union, Japan, France, Canada and West Germany. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provided the U.S. venue, which ran from late 1976 to spring 1979. In America, more than 8 million people waited hours to see these gilded, priceless objects. As art works, they dazzled the eye; as cultural objects, they provided a glimpse of early human history far removed from the modern age. Initial reception to the Discovery Center’s show indicate that all things Tut continue to enthrall adults and children.
In 1977, English writer Penelope Fitzgerald reflected on art as entertainment in her first novel, The Golden Child. Although she began to publish at age 60, the Booker Prize-winning writer appears to have been born to the profession. Daughter of Punch editor Edmund Knox (1879-1958), Fitzgerald counted among other illustrious relatives her father’s brothers: crime writer Ronald Knox, cryptographer Dilly Knox and biblical scholar Wilfred Knox. Her aunt Winifred Peck was a novelist, and her stepmother daughter of Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator Ernest H. Shepard. From 1977 to 1985, Fitzgerald wrote eight novels filled with refined wit, ironic humor and incisive social commentary. For many of her settings, plots and characters, Fitzgerald drew on personal experiences as World War II correspondent for the BBC (Human Voices), drama school teacher (At Freddie’s), houseboat denizen (Offshore) and bookshop clerk (The Bookshop).
Before her death in 2000, Fitzgerald commented that she wrote The Golden Child for her husband, an Irish soldier, who was declining from a terminal illness. Set in an institution meant to recall the British Museum and its 1972 Egyptian exhibit, The Golden Child opens with an unforgettable scene: faceless crowds of men, women and school children on a queue circling the museum and park. Encouraged by newspaper headlines across the country, they wait to see the “golden treasure” of the Garamantes, an ancient race of Saharan desert dwellers. This trove consists of a young king’s relics and a cache of gilded toys for afterlife amusement. Securely ensconced in the museum’s upper reaches, their elderly eccentric discoverer, Sir William, refuses association with his 1913 find. Yet he expresses concern for the queues subjected to inflated entrance fees; freezing temperatures; and inferior refreshments and facilities. In return for their patient endurance, the queues receive a few moments to view the treasure. As efficient security staff keeps the ball rolling (and the queue moving) and curators seethe at the public’s intrusion on their hallowed halls, Fitzgerald manipulates the curators’ long-simmering fears, jealousies and ambitions into a well-plotted whodunit.
But in Fitzgerald’s hands, murder and mystery merely expose museum politics and human greed. Provoked by doubt of the treasure’s authenticity, the impeccably attired museum director sends a lowly exhibition planner named Waring Smith to consult an elusive Soviet authority. Not surprisingly, the Soviet regime has a stake in the treasure unearthed thousands of years ago in Central North Africa.2 Arranged by the director’s perfectly correct secretary, Waring Smith’s travel plans place him in a group of savvy tourists. Unlike him, they own winter-wear equal to sub-zero Moscow temperatures. Dodging their hostile stares and shivering through snow-laden streets, Waring Smith struggles with personal problems (mortgage, neglected wife, career potential). Meanwhile, his consciousness matures. Fitzgerald narrates his trip as something of a comic opera or visit to a hall of mirrors. He cannot fail to connect the queues outside his museum with endless lines of citizens waiting outside the Kremlin to view an embalmed Lenin; one night spent at the circus opens his eyes to the skewed perceptions of power and authority promoted from above: underneath their polished veneer, he realizes, the clowns lead the band. Dressed by the best London tailors, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, the men pulling the strings are fools. And in the hands of fools, power is dangerous.
Before the exhibit, Waring Smith knew his superiors to be capable of professional murder, never imagining that they can kill more than a reputation. Now summoned back to London, he realizes that Sir William and the odd-ball museum personnel he champions (a nap-prone, pregnant secretary; a devoted body guard; a conflict-promoting technician) are models of decency. Governments, museums and multinational corporations hope to gain pots of money and prestige from the treasure, but Sir William wants none of it.
Quiet and quirky, Fitzgerald’s novels are wonders of subtlety and wisdom. Their plots and characters reveal absurdities in the human condition hidden in plain sight. While it is easier to ignore our failings, it is far more entertaining to consider them played out in finely crafted fiction. In The Golden Child, the museum stands as one powerful element in a vast politically motivated chain. In truth, the Greatest Show on Earth is a human drama, and art an intangible given material form and driving the action.
1 The tomb was opened by English archeologist Howard Carter and his team in 1923.
2 Believed to be of Berber origin, the Garamantes of Southern Libya ruled the interior central part of North Africa from ca.500 BC to 500 AD.
