Book Club - Victoria Purman’s The Radio Hour

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Victoria Purman is a bestselling author in Australia and the US. Her historical fiction includes A Woman’s Work, The Nurses’ War, The Women’s Pages, and The Land Girls.

Victoria’s new novel is The Radio Hour.

The year is 1956.

When Martha Berry started out at the national broadcaster nearly thirty years ago she couldn’t imagine where it would take her…

Not so far it turns out, as she shunts between jobs as secretary for men who wouldn’t know one end of their pencils from the other if they didn't occasionally stick it in their… ear.

Now Martha has been tasked with looking after the new wunderkind writer. He’s been commissioned to create a new hit series but all he’s got so far is a title and a drinking problem.

Martha loves the radio and she can’t believe that its future could be in the hands of this buffoon. Someone has to step up and save As The Sun Sets, but could that someone possibly be Martha?

The Radio Hour is a gorgeous evocation of the golden years of radio and a period of enormous transition as Australia prepares for television to debut on screens across the country.

The conceit of the social transformation wrought by television is matched by the social rumblings wrought by the mass consumption of popular stories on the radio…

When we meet Marha she is fifty years old and considered somehow left behind by a world that prides women only in the domestic sphere. Sexist attitudes are matched by sexist laws and even Martha’s existence in government service is only supported by the fact she never married (married women were barred from working for the government).

The Radio Hour cleverly illustrates this through Martha’s friendship with ‘The Calendar Girls’. In the world of 1956 Australia April, May and June could equally be Martha’s daughters or her peers and their work relationship fosters tremendous dialogue that explores the mores of this world, whilst pointing a way forward.

Martha’s is by no means the typical hero's journey but it’s a journey she must undertake. Sexism and patriarchy may not look like your typical end level boss, or dragon guarding a mountain of treasure (but then maybe you’re just not looking at it the right way!)

In the world of the novel, radio serials are the communal fire the country gathers around. Martha loves them too much to see them fail and so she must undertake to rescue her hapless boss by writing As the Sun Sets herself.

You can’t be it if you can’t see it and so Martha must simultaneously write herself into the story even as she crafts a narrative that opens up the Australian public to the modern world (or at least modern as it was in the 50’s_

The Radio Hour unapologetically tugs at the heart strings as it follows Martha’s creative journey. The novel doesn’t hide her trajectory towards success, not does it pretend that Martha alone can fix the problems of a top-heavy masculine culture, that still predominates some seventy years later.

Instead the novel revels in the power of stories to facilitate change, their power to show people a different world, or perhaps just the world they live in just without a prejudicial lens.