Johnston "the Australian brain on stilts" is cantankerous but brilliant. Clift and Ilhan both stuck in their roles as inspiration to creative men, but shown to hold reserves of strength and wit and radiance of their own that make them irresistible. And Cohen, Samson's Leonard Cohen, saunters through the book, sharing profundities, pure sex and charisma and genius. One doesn't need a schooling in Greek legend to know what happens when a God moves among mortals.

But it's actually in the creation of Erica, its protagonist, that Samson does her most accomplished and moving work. Introduced in her stifling family home in the aftermath of the convalescence and death of her mother, Erica and her awakening is delicately but compellingly drawn. She takes in glistening water and sparkling conversations alike, an appealing and naïve narrator and guide, drawn into the turmoil between these beguiling older figures.

If the prose tends, at times, towards the florid, ultimately the reading experience is indulgent and alluring. The setting is magical and evocative, the artists, writers and musicians warm and lovingly drawn.

Maybe the pleasures within are a by-product of reading it today, with a world locked down in fear and illness. Cohen died on November 7, 2016, the day before Trump's election, and Samson's opening when an aged Erica returns to the hills of Hydra reflecting on time and loss, explicitly grounds what is to follow in this air of regret and disappointment.

And it's this that lifts this novel from being a hollow exercise in historical escapism or cheap cultural tourism. Its account of youth and utopianism is tempered by the notes of melancholy, the ache of nostalgia. And never stronger than in the relationship between Erica and Clift, between the fictional creation and this extraordinary Australian cultural figure, between surrogate mother and daughter, working through their own sense of loss and striving to understand their place in the world. And it's very affecting.

Loading

By 1964, Clift and Johnston were back in Sydney, Johnston on the precipice of true success with My Brother Jack, and Clift drinking too much and working for The Sydney Morning Herald on her celebrated columns. "There is a sort of dreamlike quality in returning to a place where one was young," she wrote. "Memory is as tricky as a flawed window glass that distorts the view beyond according to the way one turns one's head." Five years later she took her own life.

It's little wonder the deep tragedy of her story inspired Samson. Where memory might have distorted Clift's views of her own past, the gift of fiction is a window glass to a Charmian Clift still living a life bathed in the warm, Greek sun, surrounded by gardenias and white-washed walls, food and conversation, art and music and sex.

There is pain in this story, and its insights into the fraught nature of the relationship between creativity and life, between being a muse and one's on creation, are thoughtful and resonant, but there is also great joy.