A Theatre for Dreamers

Such a luminous beautiful book. The writing sparkles like the sea and the reader is blinded by the sun on the white buildings. When I was reading it, I was perfectly ready to believe that it was a true account of Erica's time on Hydra, so real were the characters, so vibrant their personalities. I wanted to leave immediately and go there.

Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen drift in and out of this account of a young woman's experiences on the Greek island where a colony of writers and artists hold court. Real people mingle seamlessly with the fictional. The bitching of Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift is portrayed with brutal honesty, while the casual bedhopping of the younger crowd goes on in the background.

This novel highlights the burgeoning women's rights movement of the early 60s. On Hydra, and elsewhere, the women subsume their own creative instincts in order to facilitate those of the men. Marianne is the best at this and seems to want nothing more than to nourish first her unfaithful husband, Axel, then Leonard. For Charmian, though, it is a different story. Frustrated both sexually and creatively she struggles to stay within the confines of her marriage and her supposed duties. She urges Erica, a budding writer, not to be simply some man's muse and helpmeet, but to get on and find her own voice.

Beauty and tragedy walk hand in hand on Hydra and over the years the island and its inhabitants change and leave, some becoming victims of the earlier freedoms.

When I finished this book I went right back to the beginning and started to read it again. I shall certainly look out for Polly Samson's books in future.

Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ) and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Mesmerising, compelling, evocative and utterly stunning - one of the most profound novels of our age. Finishing 'A Theatre for Dreamers' was like waking from the most beautiful dream. Shaking myself from the trance-like state, however, means distilling this wonderful work of literary fiction into what I fear are inadequate, ham-fisted words. Polly Samson's lyrical, luminous prose, almost seems to defy the prosaic format of a book review. Every word seems to stem from an organic, stream of consciousness, which we readers are privileged to share with this gifted author. With barely an indentation on the page, seemingly we float along, almost imperceptibly, to the shores of 1960s Hydra, and the inimitable bohemian personalities we meet under a blazing hot, Greek sun. This is a novel about the tangled interplay of human relations. Idealistic utopias of the innocent transformed into something darker and more destructive. Reality melds with fiction in the vein of a Nicola Upson novel. We meet Charmian Clift and George Johnston; Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen. Our metacharacter, for the stories that unfold, is teenager Erica. Subsumed, yet separate from the lives and loves of the inhabitants of Hydra. Gender is quite often their battleground. We are at the shores of Second-wave feminism, but this jars incongruently with the men of the liberal elite of this cloistered community. Women are vacuums, mere empty vessels to be filled with the desires and expectations of men. This is the story of women and men; gender relations idealised in theory and confounded in practice, with very real, tragic consequences for the bohemian elite of Hydra.

Simply stunning, beautiful and haunting - a must-read for 2020