It is 1960. The protagonist, Erica, and her brother, Bobby, leave their abusive father following their mother's death and take the beatnik trail to the Greek island of Hydra where they join the artist's colony there for a glorious summer. We're talking sun, sand, skinny-dipping, ouzo and lots of sex. There is work going on: typewriters up and down the island are being hammered by wannabe writers who talk about their muses while those muses cook and clean and carry ice to the ice-store and water to the cistern. This point is made repeatedly: that the women are propping up the men. This is particularly true of the key relationship in the book: the marriage between Charmian Clift and George Johnston: he has TB and sweats buckets trying to write books which will keep them solvent while she juggles housework, the demands of three young children, keeping him inspired and motivated, and never has enough time for their own writing. He treats her abominably.
Very few of the men are anything other than baddies. The mad Swede Axel is horrible to his wife Marianne, blatantly and cruelly having an affair as if he expects to have his cake and eat it (but then Marianne hops back and forth between Axel and Leonard). The narrator's boyfriend, about whom we know little apart from his physical beauty, repeatedly betrays her. Her brother is surly and truculent and her father back in London is a wife-and-child beating villain straight out of melodrama: if he had possessed moustaches he would have twirled them; I was just surprised he wasn't called Sir Jasper. Encountering such a caricature so early on almost made me give up on the book. The narrator gives reasons for male bad behaviour: father changed after the horrors of the retreat to Dunkirk and George was a journalist reporting on the horrors of famine in China during the war; both these men clearly have a form of PTSD but it is only their wives who seem to understand. Similarly, Erica realises (rather belatedly) that Bobby has depression but doesn't seem to connect this with his physically abused childhood or his recent loss of his mother. Perhaps this is the narrator 'in character': a young woman with all the self-centredness of the young translated into wilful blindness. But even after she returns from Hydra to nurse her derelict father, even as the narrator turns into a wise old woman, there seems no understanding let alone forgiveness.
More and more I find that the best books are those in which the author empathises with the villains.
I couldn't decide whether the narrator believed that her summer on Hydra was the most wonderful time of her life or the most dreadful. Yes, living in a primitive community required hard grind. But the aforementioned sun, swimming and sex seemed pretty much like paradise for young people. And Erica and her young friends didn't have to work for a living (unlike the indigenous islanders, who are very much in the background, and George).
Charmian and George were real people, as are many of the other characters in the book, including Leonard Cohen the singer-songwriter who appears as a sort of guru-like figure, always ready to resolve a conflict (and there are plenty, mostly to do with the incorrigible bed-hopping of these promiscuous outsiders) with wise words. The second key relationship is between Marianne Ihlen and Axel Jensen, with Marianne leaving Axel after having Axel's baby and moving in with Leonard.
I found it a very interesting book, as a sort of fictionalised multi-person biography. Its biggest failing was the huge cast-list. As well as the characters above there are Jimmy, Erica's boyfriend, and Edie, Bobby's girlfirend, and Trudy, later Bobby's wife, and Dinos, and Chuck, and Gordon, and Patrick Greer (who is almost always, anomalously, surnamed), and Goran, and Jean-Claude Maurice (another with a surname), and Janey, and Charmian and George's children Martin and Shane and Booli, and Nancy, and a playwright called Kenneth and his wife Janis, and Angela and David, and Bim and Robyn, and Demetri and Carolyn, and Greg Corso, and Patricia, and to be honest I lost track of most of them. The trouble is that so many of them are real people so I suppose that the author didn't feel that she could cull any of them. But then the trouble is that they can't all be given any more than the most rudimentary characters: they are little more than spear carriers. And this extended to the central cast. The only characters that were developed with any complexity were Charmian and George, and, perhaps, Marianne. Even the narrator was little more than an observer. Other major characters were fundamentally one-dimensional: Bobby was depressed, Jimmy was beautiful and unfaithful, Leonard was, as already said, a guru and guide.
This failure to create complex characters undermined the novel. The problem with using real characters is that there is very little plot: real life is rarely neatly crafted. So it was more an examination of the relationship between Charmian and George (which was paralleled by the relationship of the narrator's parents) and the Axel, Marianne, Leonard triangle. Given this, I felt that the superfluity of other characters distracted me and blurred the focus.
It's mostly well-paced, with the trip up the mountain to worship the sun god at the 25% mark, the transfer of Marianne from Axel to Leonard at the half-way mark and the disappearance of unfaithful Jimmy at the 75% mark. However the last 10% of the book, which acts as a sort of extended epilogue after Erica has returned from Hydra, and in which so many of the books revelations are concentrated, seems cramped and rushed to the extent that her husband and her son are not even named. It felt as if the author was saying: let's get it over with. This badly unbalanced the book.
The key real characters are:
- Charmian Clift, a memoirist, novelist and essayist, who, as foreshadowed extensively in this novel, committed suicide when her husband's best novel Clean Straw for Nothing contained a barely-disguised account of her infidelities (although in this book it is suggested that she wrote the key scene as a fantasy)
- George Johnston, a successful journalist and later award-winning novelist, who died of TB shortly after the death by suicide of his wife
- Leonard Cohen, best known as a singer-songwriter although this was subsequent to his career as a poet and a novelist; he is most famous for the songs Hallelujah and Bird on the Wire
- Axel Jensen, an experimental novelist
- Marianne Ihlen, married to Axel and later the muse of Leonard Cohen who wrote So Long, Marianne about her
- Göran Tunström, a prolific novelist and poet
- Greg Corso, a beat poet who was friends with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac
- "The typing pool where I worked was a torture in triplicate of clattering keys, pinging bells and bottom pinchers." (Ch 1) When she relocates to Hydra, Erica discovers a whole island of typewriting bottom pinchers. Is this a foreshadowing?
- "The skin of his face appears three sizes too big for him." (Ch 3)
- "You're children. You should have fun in the playground while you;re young." (Ch 9)
- "I have no idea who I am. I seem to have hatched while no one was looking." (Ch 9)
- "Leonard gave off an unmistakable air of a man who has always been there before you." (Ch 13)
- "Decolletage jellying from cabbage-green ruffles" (Ch 21)
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