Gilgamesh by Joan London

Utopian dreamers in a world scarred by war

It is 1937, and Edith is an impoverished, uneducated teenager, eking out a precarious living with her shrewish older sister Frances and her mentally frail mother on the infertile plot of land her father Frank failed to tame in the wilds of south-western Australia.

In Joan London's novel, the two strangers who will transform Edith's life now arrive. Her cousin Leopold, an archaeologist, and his friend and driver, the handsome Armenian Aram, have travelled from Iraq on a whim. They bring with them the clamour, and glamour, of a distant world. Leopold's intellectual energy, and Aram's wounded sensuality and passionate idealism, bewitch her. Aram, orphaned by the 1915 Turkish massacre, dreams of returning to fight for independence in Soviet Armenia.

Gilgamesh is a lyrical and thoughtful novel that evokes the pain of broken dreams and the determination to resist. Frank's dreams of a socialist utopia in the group settlements of Australia, far from a Europe scarred by the First World War, end in ruin; as do Aram's dreams for his Armenian homeland.

When the two young men leave, as suddenly as they arrived, Edith is bereft, with only Leopold's copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Aram's illegitimate baby to remind her of their presence. She survives the inevitable censure by clinging to a dream: that she will travel to Armenia and find Aram. Despite her knowledge that as a woman she has "no freedom to go adventuring", Edith is consumed by her lyrical vision of Armenia, more a state of mind that a real place. This fuels her foolhardy determination to resist the stultifying conformity of her life and set out on an epic voyage with her baby Jim, via the grimy bowels of a tanker to London, on to Bulgaria, Istanbul and finally Yerevan.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest poem, is a leitmotif that informs the characters' actions and the novel's structure. The book, a gift from Leopold to Edith, is in itself a talisman that promises first Edith, then Jim, the possibility of a heroic life. The parallels between the characters' lives and Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king who sought immortality with his beloved wild companion Enkidu, are not exact. Aram, as friend, lover and father, is lost to the underworld like Enkidu, but every adventurer - Leopold, Edith and finally Jim - takes on some aspect of Gilgamesh in his battle against the gods. London does much more than map the myth on to a 20th-century story. She discerns and explores the mythic longings, the invisible epic battles, that give depth to everyday lives.

Edith is an intrepid traveller, but we are not spared the mundane details of the journey: the fatigue, the dirty nappies, the inconsolable screaming of an infant on the Orient Express. Whether we attribute the patterns of life to psychological determinism or the gods, Edith finds herself in a world that is far stranger than she could have bargained for, but that mirrors the family she left behind. Like Gilgamesh, she cannot escape her fate. London's narrative spans a global trajectory and a rich and colourful cast of characters. Beautifully written and constructed, dreamlike yet believable, this a remarkable first novel.