A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson review – sun, sex and Leonard Cohen

It’s unlikely Polly Samson knew that her fifth novel would be launched into a world teetering on the edge of the abyss, but there is something calculated about a book this sun-drenched coming out in early spring. Sitting in the shutdown, watching a grey mizzle of a day fade outside, A Theatre for Dreamers feels at once like a gift and an escape route. It’s set on the dreamy Greek island of Hydra in 1960, focusing on the international bohemian set that surrounded the authors Charmian Clift and George Johnston. Prominent among the artists, poets and scroungers are a Norwegian couple – Axel Jensen and Marianne Ihlen – and a young, charismatic Canadian by the name of Leonard Cohen.

With such a vivid, atmospheric setup, the book almost writes itself, but Samson has done something more than just wallow in the loveliness of it all. This novel will be a surefire summer hit, but it has a darkness and complexity that reward careful reading. Cohen and Marianne operate at tangents to the central story of the novel, which is narrated by the likable ingenue Erica, a novitiate novelist in her late teens whose mother’s dying wish was for her daughter to go off on an adventure. Erica’s mother lived under the heel of a primly dictatorial husband, although there is evidence of a secret life in her friendship with Clift and a squirrelled-away bequest that permits Erica, her brother Bobby and her boyfriend Jimmy to escape drab London for Greece. They come, as the irate and tubercular George Johnston puts it, “lured by our fantastically blue water and cheap rent to live out their carefree immorality away from prying city eyes”.

Partly, the novel does exactly what one would expect, giving us a kind of sexed-up The Durrells of bougainvillea and thyme-scented hillsides, sunbathing and skinny-dipping in coves of crystalline water. There’s a lot of high-flown prose, sentences that Lawrence Durrell himself would be proud of, for instance: “This evening has been born from one of those murmuring sundowns, our bodies molten as the sea and the sky turned to honey.” More than this, though, it asks us to interrogate the mores of the 60s generation, which spoke so much about emancipation for women, but practised it hardly at all. Axel is a rotter, ignoring his wife and baby to waltz off with a host of younger women, while George and Charmian bicker and snipe at each other in person and in print. What could be paradise swiftly turns into something like a nightmare for Marianne, at least until Leonard arrives. At one point Charmian asks Erica: “Where would these male writers be without their ministering angels?” But the novel’s message seems to question and problematise the role of muse.

Erica is a kind of Nick Carraway-figure, largely on the outside of events, observing and learning from the more experienced, glamorous people she has fallen in with. Her first-person narrative – in a breathless present tense – lingers almost painfully over descriptions of Cohen, so that he does to the text what it was said he did to a room, dazzling everything in sight. 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 novel is bookended by Erica’s later visits to the island, where she drops down through time to those halcyon days before Leonard and Marianne became a kind of shorthand for the artist and his muse, and everything is melancholy and nostalgic. A Theatre for Dreamers is at once a blissful piece of escapism and a powerful meditation on art and sexuality – just the book to bring light into these dark days.

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson is published by Bloomsbury Circus (£14.99)