In the following review, Chamberlain offers positive assessment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In the following review, Stade offers positive evaluation of Sphinx.

In the following review, Goreau offers unfavorable evaluation of Lying Together and Thomas's “Russian Nights” series. Goreau finds fault in Thomas's preoccupation with theory and ideas over plot and characters in these novels.

In the following review, Dickstein offers unfavorable evaluation of Ararat.

In the following review, Busch offers tempered evaluation of Pictures at an Exhibition, which he describes as “alternately horrifying and annoying.”

In the following review, Kincaid offers positive evaluation of Eating Pavlova.

In the following review, Dinnage offers favorable assessment of Eating Pavlova.

In the following review, Woll offers negative evaluation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In the following review, Eder offers unfavorable assessment of Summit.

In the following review, Slavitt offers positive assessment of Lady With a Laptop.

In the following review, O'Brien offers tempered assessment of The Puberty Tree.

In the following review Houston offers positive assessment of Flying to Love.

In the following review, Tonkin offers unfavorable assessment of Sphinx.

In the following review, Cheyette offers negative assessment of Pictures at an Exhibition.

In the following review, Fleming offers favorable assessment of Pictures at an Exhibition.

It's not really necessary, of course, for a reviewer to make the plot entirely clear to prospective readers. But in Ararat, the whole point is the plot—its devilish cleverness, or its maddening obscurity, however you choose to view it. In any case, it's not an honest plot. If a contract exists between writer and reader that the writer will do his best to draw the reader in and the reader will do his best to follow, D. M. Thomas reneged on his part of the deal. To be fair, he didn'...

In the following review, Binyon offers unfavorable assessment of Flying to Love.

In the following review, Dudar offers unfavorable assessment of Memories and Hallucinations.

Swallow picks up where Ararat left off. Once again [Thomas] confronts his readers with the indefatigable Russian poet Rozanov, a womanizer with an extraordinary talent for literary improvisation. And once again Thomas's ability to weave a number of disparate stories into an uncannily unified whole has yielded a highly entertaining piece of fiction. In Swallow Rozanov has not quite extracted himself from the dilemma into which he blundered in Ararat, a commitment to spending a night with Olga, a blind...

[In Ararat, D. M. Thomas attempts a balancing act somewhat like Umberto Eco's in The Name of the Rose]: on the one hand the book is loaded with Significance; on the other it's all Fiction Games receding in an infinite series. This creates an annoyingly schizophrenic effect in which the serious is undercut by the clever, and the clever made heavy by the portentous. It's a puzzling book, partly because it's made out of puzzles, partly because after two readings I'm still not...

By making the central character [of Birthstone] a split personality [D. M. Thomas] attaches his book to a long line of doppelgänger fictions, and thereby applies for a certificate of profound intent. Conrad's The Secret Sharer, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are obvious ancestors, and behind them—stretching right across Europe—stands a host of others. But while Thomas implicitly refers to them, he seldom allows himself to ma...

There are always plenty of paramours in D. M. Thomas's work, and one must respect, if even at a certain hesitant distance, his nervous, experimental, and erotic muse…. Thomas is at it again [in Love and Other Deaths], what with three erotic sequences here, one based on the I Ching, another on the figure of Eve's apocryphal rival, Lilith, and the third on what he calls "a central contemporary myth: the kidnapping of a diplomat by extremists." I'm afraid I'm no...

The mysterious privacy to be found in [the various landscapes of The Honeymoon Voyage] is one the poet shares with those divine and human presences who, whether rooted or in exile, define the numen of their homes and in collusion with their recorder allow the reader to participate in their own myths. In this sense Thomas is one of the least egocentric of writers, concerned to feel his way through self-effacements into the disturbing otherness of worlds where ancestral voices speak in their allusive tongues ...

For some years [Thomas's] poetry was best known for a science fiction element but his collection The Honeymoon Voyage (1978 …) displayed a wide range of subject matter and was very well received. [Dreaming in Bronze] shows a continued progress in material and technique. The collection is divided into two sections. In the first, the poems are in the form of letters, journals or accounts by characters set in literary or historical context; Freud appears both as a character and as an influence on...

D.M. Thomas is a notable translator of modern Russian verse and [The Flute Player] is an imaginative meditation on the themes and landscapes of that literature. Against a dream-like background of wars and purges we watch a generation of artists struggling to survive. The setting is never specifically identified as Russia, and there are times when we appear to be in Berlin rather than Moscow. But our contemporary image of the artist's life as heroic endeavour is derived almost entirely from the unoffi...

It is only in the last few pages of this awkwardly impressive novel [The Flute Player] that the heroine, Elena, at some sort of peace at last, begins to play the flute. Before that she plays, with a sort of resigned zest, every passive female part to the friends and husbands that come and go through the unnamed city she inhabits. People appear and disappear, are feted, sacked, imprisoned, released, rehabilitated, and arrested again. The populace, denied any political initiative, trims its sails to the veeri...

[The Flute Player] is one of the most skillfull, moving and imaginative pieces of fiction I have read in years…. [Mr Thomas] has written a tremendously moving book dedicated to Mandelstam, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, a fantasy based sometimes loosely, sometimes very directly upon their lives and works, and above all on the survival of poetry, love and humanity in an imaginary city that bears a striking resemblance to Leningrad. We are taken through a series of revolutions, NEPs, purges and th...

[The Flute Player is] a fantasy about art and totalitarianism. The setting for this is an unnamed, vaguely representative city where pogroms, purges and plagues are unleashed upon the populace as temporary despots crash up and down on the switchback of power. The characters are vaguely representative as well—and none more so than the central figure, Elena, who has a 'flawless, rather enigmatic face' and appears to embody Love and Inspiration…. [She] is obviously on the side of li...

Two Voices by D. M. Thomas is at least two collections in one. The confusion is made the worse by the intrusive cover-photographs, clichés of the 1930's avant garde, which would be plain ugly in any period. The long science-fiction poems in the early part of the book have a sort of ghost-written effect, but the interest comes and goes. Things improve with a number of shorter poems like The Head-Rape, a horror poem, but at least a convincing one, still in the science-fiction genre, and Wolfbane...

D. M. Thomas has divided [Love and Other Deaths] into parts. The first contains more or less traditional poems dealing with family deaths. Often moving and sometimes quite good as well, they partly redeem the horror that comes after. Even here,… obligatory modishness creeps in with its spoiling hand. In "Dream", for example, we get a reference to "my woman", a phrase that has come to rank almost with the ampersand as a species marker. But "my woman" is phoney...

[Thomas] considers himself primarily a poet, even in his fiction, which shares with his verse a preoccupation, or rather, an obsession, with sex and death. [In Selected Poems, the] graveyards and scenes of departure, particularly of Mother, are sufficiently depressing. But the "love" poems are more unpleasant. Though filled with sexual details, language, and symbols, the impression these often coarse and quirky lines convey is not so much erotic or sensual as gross and fetid. The voyeuristic c...

There is nothing underwritten about D. M. Thomas's new book of poems [Dreaming in Bronze]; many of them are vigorous monologues by the neurotic and obsessed. Mr Thomas is clearly a writer who takes it as axiomatic that obsession is artistically fruitful, and that extreme states of mind are in some way more real than sanity. (See his novel, The White Hotel.) Those who share these notions will enjoy most of the book; those who look to poetry as a means of providing a sane perspective on ...

Love and Other Deaths: you can take the choice. I don't feel that D. M. Thomas, a poet of ranging and fertile imagination, has yet settled for what he really wants, but at least [this] largish collection provides plenty to choose from. I'll take, not the sci-fi verse or mythological excursions which blend with it, but those compassionate, discerning, well-made poems 'of death and loss' which are closer to his personal concerns; especially 'Dream', and 'Retice...

Thomas's poems are condensed narratives in much the same way that his prose is a logical extension of years of immersion in the poetic form. He is an unusual hybrid who has cultivated his own consciousness to create a personal myth composed of equal parts of morbid eroticism, his memory of a Cornwall childhood, a romanticization of Freud and Jung and a profound fascination for the Slavic variety of Weltschmerz. As poetry, [Thomas's Selected Poems] are most valuable for their obdurate shock val...

Around [the] unpromising hokum [of the plot in Birthstone], D.M. Thomas weaves a tale full of symbolic and lyrical poetry—he is, after all, primarily a poet—leaving room for a weft of wry humour and a woof of humanity to adorn the fantasy. Speech and description, particularly of Cornwall, that oddest of English counties, are handled in a clear and fluent style…. On the whole a disappointing follow-up to the author's acclaimed Flute-Player. Seán Wyse Jackson, &...