SUNTOUCHED, by Theresa Nicholas: A Review

Theresa Nicholas’ “Suntouched, A Dark Comedy on a Greek Island” makes for a truly compulsive read, and this is the third time I have read it, the first time as a published book (Pen Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-907499-84-5).

Ever since I read an unedited version five years ago, I strongly believed that it should be published and that it would prove a great success.

Theresa Nicholas will celebrate her eightieth birthday this summer, and the publication of “Suntouched” is the perfect way to celebrate her creativity and long connections with the island of Corfu, where she has lived since the early 1960s.

From her sketches and paintings in “Corfu Sketches: A Thirty Year Journey", John Waller and Theresa Nicholas, Yiannis Books, 2008, one can recognise many aspects of the island as it used to be, and the simple, colourful life style with which she fell in love, an island that only really began to change and modernise in the 1970s.

Her novel, although not explicitly set on Corfu, reveals most of its locations without too much detective work.

Corfu was not all wonderful in those years, and the establishment of a casino in the Achilleion Palace proved a curse to many, including Tassos, the novel’s main fictional creation, who is a real tour de force.

The book is certainly about the natural beauty of an unspoilt Greek island in the 60s and 70s (the descriptions of nature are beautifully observed and written), but the prime focus of the narrative is the obsessive love affair between an English woman, who has escaped a typical English fate, and an older Greek man, an unselfconscious existentialist, who exhibits many of the larger-than-life characteristics of Kazantzakis’ hero Zorba (as played by Anthony Quinn), plus some. Tassos is an attractive life force and symbol of Greece to many foreign women who fall for his paintings, his dancing and his manly vitality.

Theresa portrays her English heroine and her lover vividly (albeit through non-Greek eyes, with a measure of romantic projection and some naïve but often comic phantasising) with all his faults and attractions, including his penchant for drinking and gambling, and her use of broken English dialogue works wonderfully in bringing to life Tasso’s humour, his rebellious attitudes and changing moods. He can be violent when he has been drinking, but the novel’s long-suffering heroine stays with him, in spite of the fact that he is a married man with children, and a string of other summer-season admirers. He's not a kamaki: he simply wants to sell his paintings to supplement his income and to have a good time.

The internal feelings and thoughts of an intelligent, talented and resilient English woman who accepts the fate she has chosen and who is portrayed as having blazed a trail that many others were to follow after her (and which some lived to regret in real life) provide authentic psychological insights which make “Suntouched” an essential read.

I knew Corfu for much of the period that Theresa describes, and I was living and working on the island during the first year of the Military Coup.

I never once set foot in the casino, and my experience of the same Greek island was very different. Theresa Nicholas describes some of the eccentric expatriates to whom her subjugated heroine is occasionally allowed to talk by her jealous and occasionally brutal Greek lover.

The book is a dark comedy indeed, and ends in tragedy, but that indomitable Greek life force and joie de vivre survives beyond the grave, and this fine work of fiction is testimony to that.