The Flute-Player

The Flute-Player (Gollancz, 1979) is a fiction book by British novelist, poet, playwright and translator Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas. Thomas considers the book to be one of his six strongest novels.^[1] It was Thomas's first novel to be published, though it was the second he had written.^[2]

The book tells the story of Elena, a woman in an unspecified city and unspecified country who lives through tumultuous political changes. During this time she is forced to make ends meet by working as a prostitute, dancer, artist's model and servant. According to Thomas, "This novel emerged out of fascination with Russian poets and particularly Anna Akhmatova. I wanted a generic figure, a woman who preserved the truth of the word, while chaos reigned all around her. I didn't want to individualise the characters too much, so there is very little dialogue in this novel."^[2]

The plot is told in the past tense third person except for short sections in the present tense and first person.

It won the Gollancz/Guardian Fantasy Prize.^[3]

The novel was reviewed favorably by William Gibson in a 1981 review for the fanzine Science Fiction Review^[4]:

This is an extraordinarily fine fantasy novel, winner of the "Gollancz/Picador/Guardian Fantasy Competition", that will probably be read by only a handful of American "fantasy readers". I understand that an American edition is now out, although I haven't seen it.

Elena, the protagonist, lives in a country that might be Russia, or some Kafka-esque Germany, in a city made up of equal parts of Leningrad and Berlin. Elena's story is a harrowing fable of totalitarianism's necessary war on art, a story to some extent based on the lives of Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. This is a tremendously moving book set in one of the chilliest and most believable hells I've run across in fiction. A story of the survival of love and poetry in the shadow of the death camps.

Sorry, no unicorns.