"A Theatre for Dreamers" by Polly Samson

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

Selected quotes:

• "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)

It's great fun reading about young people frolicking and writing poetry in paradise but there are too many characters and the ending is rushed.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

May 2023; 343 pages

"The Venetian Empire" by Jan Morris

Morris travels through the places colonised by the Venetians and provides a history as she does so. This book thus forms a sort of sequel to her Venice.

She has used this combination of travelogue and history before, such as in the brilliant Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and I'm not sure why this book wearied me. Certainly there were plenty of fascinating facts and vivid characters, from the war over the ownership of a donkey to the narrow channel that experiences fourteen tides a day, from the original of Othello, surnamed Moro, which is probably why Shakespeare assumed him to be a Moor to the dreadful Uskoks of Dalmatia: “The Uskoks were originally Christian refugees from the eastern side of the mountains, who had escaped from the Turks by guile and violence, and set themselves up to prosper by similar means on the Dalmatian shore. They were epic villains. ... Uskoks liked to nail the turbans of Turkish prisoners to their heads and sometimes cut out the hearts of their still living captives (we read of a Venetian commander whose heart, in fact, was the piece-de-resistance of a celebratory banquet.)” (Adriatica). I learned a lot: we get our word 'argosy' from the fact that Dubrovnik, once called Ragusa, was famous for its merchants and the word 'syncretize' is derived from Crete.

But the glory of a Jan Morris book is her way with words. Her descriptions are stunning:

• “The tumult of it all (fragrance of frying fish from the floating restaurant by Galata Bridge, tinkle of brass bell from the water-seller outside the Egyptian Bazaar, swoop of dingy pigeons around the mosque of Yeni Cami)” (O City, City!)
• “Humped and speckled, lush or rocky, hefty or insubstantial, littering the waters between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Crete are the islands of the Aegean Sea.” (Aegeanics)
• “During the bitter winter it [Crete] can be magnificently awful. Then the clouds which hang so often round the mountain summits spread over the whole island, swirling above the passes in mists and rainstorms, and sometimes then, when the driven vapours are tinged with southern sunshine too, the place looks all afire. Crimson clouds scud by! The winds rush up those valleys like jets, and if it thunders the crash of it sounds among the highlands as though caves are there and then being split in the rocks.” (The Great Island)

Other selected quotes:
“Going home weary after the making of the world, God took with him a sack of unused stones, but the sack burst on his way across the skies, and so Montenegro was made.” (Adriatica)

August 2022; 187 pages

Other Jan Morris books reviewed in this blog include Coronation Everest.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Bus Stop Symi" by William Travis

Travis and his wife went to live on the remote island of Symi (an eight-mile long Greek island crammed with 180 churches, chapels and monasteries, in one of whose campanile's hangs "the nose cone of a 1000-kilo bomb ... its tone is good and that is what counts", at the far end of the Dodecannese, near Rhodes, under the shadow of Turkey) for four years in the mid-1960s. They rented and renovated a house, attended weddings and funerals and festivals, and had a daughter while learning about the islanders and a different way of life on an island with no roads.

It starts with three mysteries: why does the road-less (and therefore bus-less) island have a road roller, hidden away in a warehouse, and two bus shelters?

Symi is in the Iliad (as providing three ships for Agamemnon) and is famous for Prometheus. Having stolen fire and carried it in a hollow fennel stalk (as Symi women do when taking glowing coals to light a new fire) he was punished by being turned into a monkey (simis in Greek) and confined on the Island

This is a charming and lyrical record of an alternative way of life. But there are realities and sadnesses. Symi's historical trade was sponge-diving (they held the Ottoman monopoly). They dived naked until the deep-sea diving suits came in, then they went down further. Without any understanding in those days of the dangers of surfacing too quickly, perhaps one in three of the divers died from the bends; many others were subsequently crippled. The author encounters two old divers in a tavern; underneath them is a pile of stinking rags because they can no longer control their bladders. There is a terrible story related by the heroic linesman who realised his diver was having problems and so pulled him up as quickly as he could; he is proud of having saved the man's life and has no realisation that his prompt action is responsible for the man's paralysis.

There is also a fascinating account of the troubles of the second world war and the destruction of the Acropolis when the Germans blew up their stored ammunition before leaving the island; one German breaking the secrecy in which this was supposed to happen and so enabling perhaps five hundred villagers to evacuate from the area before the explosion.

One of the lasting legacies was that this couple taught the islanders to swim. Before then, despite being a an island of fishermen and sponge divers, no one swam: "the sea was dangerous ... It tasted bitter and it choked you. It took the young men away to foreign lands and drowned those who sought in its depths for sponges." (C 8)

There are wonderful anecdotes. One concerns how a priest (who are married men, often from the community, and treated without especial reverence, at a baptism, angry at being jostled, thrust his Bible at an offending woman, striking her in the breasts. She retaliated and pushed him over; he struck his head on a marble step and it required all the available holy water to revive him. The baptism had to be cancelled.

This is better than the Corfu trilogy of Gerald Durrell (My family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, Garden of the Gods). True it lacks the bizzare antics of the Durrell family and it lacks even more the purple patches of pure wondrous description that Durrell manages it. However, it treats the Symiots with respect, rather than just as quirky characters, and at the end I felt I truly understood the everyday lives of the islanders.

Selected quotes:

• "Like most of Greece, Symi is built upon the bones of her conquerors and has become a living monument to them all." (C 1)
• "Borne on the shoulders of four men was the coffin - but open and with the corpse propped up for all the world to see, or, as an observer said; 'Taking its last look round' ... Here was Death itself for all to see - green-skinned, shrunken-faced with open rictus-set jaw and shrivelled, blackened tongue. Over one edge of the coffin dangled a skinny foot ... to show the townsfolk that the deceased was going to his grave properly shod and not as a pauper." (C 3)
• "Baptisms are more important than battles and to hold a grandchild by the hand is to hold life. He who holds a grenade holds but death ... which is why they have bomb-cases as church bells, artillery shells as flower pots, gun barrels as candle sticks ..."(C 6)
• "The month of May is considered unlucky for marriages to be solemnized since this is when donkeys - notoriously difficult breeders in spite of their lustiness - are coupled." (C 7)
• "A couple of years ago a group of Symi's virgins were discovered in an empty building, high up on the mountainside, dancing frenziedly about Savas [a teenage village idiot] naked as Pan and quite as hairy, with garlands around his neck and mountain flowers woven in the mat of his pubic hair and adorning his rampant phallus. Maenads still exist upon the Symiot hills it seems, and bacchanals are still celebrated." (C 7)
• "Who can call washing-up an unpleasantness when all that is required is to slide greasy plates and cutlery a fathom deep onto a bed of sea-urchins and return an hour later to find the crockery scoured bone-clean under the polishing jaws of the sea's scavengers?" (C 8)
• "A greengrocer asleep on a bench outside his shop will be decorated by passers-by with his own goods." (C 9)
• "The Orthodox Church ... insists that all its village priests are married - for how can a family-less bachelor, albeit a cleric, give acceptable advice to the labouring father of ten children?" (C 9)

October 2019; 221 pages

Other memoirs reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony