"A Theatre for Dreamers", Polly Samson

A woman who arrived in Hydra 60 years before is there walking towards Leonard's house. She knew Marianne.

The main storyline starts in 1960. At 16 in London Erica (her 1st person PoV) had been caring for her dying mother. Her boyfriend is an arty poet friend of her brother, an art student. Her father domineered the family. Her mother told Erica to dare, and left her brother a sports car the father didn't know about. Charmain, a once time neighbour and friend of her mother, invites her to Hydra. When her mother dies, her brother drives Erica and friends there. They meet a colony of writers. Erica soon works out the status and sexuality of the members.

Charmain (36, a writer with 3 kids and a writer husband) acts as a godmother. She explains the local customs. She has secrets about Erica's mother. Erica learns that her husband is impotent and that she's had affairs.

The women do the housework and worry about appearing in novels without their permission

There's limited water. Electricity goes off each night. Each ferry arrival is a possibility of excitement. There are the locals (getting poorer as sponge fishing becomes unprofitable), tourists, and the writers/artists.

Cohen, 25, arrives with guitar and typewriter. He's published a poetry book. Erica's lover's been published in Ambit (which didn't cease publication until 2022!). Axel Jensen is a more famous novelist. Marianne is away in Norway, about to give birth to their first child. He's sleeping with a girl, Pat. Marianne returns and gets rid of the girl but Axel follows. Pat is badly injured in a car Axel was drunkenly driving. Charmain and her family leave as George's novel nears publication.

A year later she meets Charmain by chance in England and discovers that her mother had a lover who she didn't run away with because she wanted to keep her children. 10 years later, now a mother, Erica returns to the island. Marianne is there. George has recently died. Charmain killed herself a year before. She learns a secret about the younger, pre-island, Charmain.

The narrator seemed rather detached from the action. She's a budding writer. She uses some metaphors/similes I like, several that I don't - I dislike sentences like "He sailed in on a sea of excuses" (no), "It's in this bath of silence that the picture starts to develop", "black as a sleeping whale" (yes), houses "solid as judges", people lying "close as sardines", "hair shiny as treacle" (yes), "it's not long before the bedsprings start singing their ... song.", "the sourness [of the conversation] is curdling the night", "the sun rises like yeast from the bowl of the mountains" (no).

Other reviews

• Alex Preston (Samson has decided to use Cohen’s own words whenever he speaks, which means we get some passages of slightly stilted lyricism that jar with the otherwise note-perfect dialogue.)
• the conversation (Samson acknowledges that she was given permission by Clift’s estate to quote from Peel Me A Lotus (1959), Clift’s travel memoir about her life on Hydra from one February to October. The effect is rather an odd seesaw between two genres)