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Birthstone
The magical properties of the birthstone Men-an-Tol are legendary. When Jo and the Bolithos crawl through it, the world on the other side looks very different. As they settle into their holiday cottage on the Cornish coast, Lola begins to grow younger, behaving with all the abandon of her volatile ancestor Lola Montez. Her son races towards senility, though not too fast to prevent him from responding to the sexual enticements of both women. But this is nothing compared to the behaviour of Jo, whose demonic alter egos interrupt her life with absurd, erotic and often violent results.
- GenresFiction
160 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
2 people are currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
D.M. Thomas
86 books84 followersD.M. Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1935. After reading English at New College, Oxford, he became a teacher and was Head of the English Department at Hereford College of Education until he became a full-time writer. His first novel The Flute-Player won the Gollancz Pan/Picador Fantasy Competition. He is also known for his collections of verse and his translation from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
He was awarded the Los Angeles Fiction prize for his novel The White Hotel, an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages; a Cholmondeley award for poetry; and the Orwell Prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He lives in his native Cornwall, England.
He was awarded the Los Angeles Fiction prize for his novel The White Hotel, an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages; a Cholmondeley award for poetry; and the Orwell Prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He lives in his native Cornwall, England.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 27, 2018
Some books are stranger than others and Birthstone is a really strange one. The novel goes somewhat like Sigmund Freud’s fantasy or, to be more precise, like some Freudian nightmare.
When the characters crawled through the birthstone odd metamorphoses started happening to them… And the novel goes on as a piece of black magic realism…
The sicker one gets in the head the more fantastic life one lives.
And there was this granite ring, sitting quietly in the silence every hour and every minute for the last four thousand years. ‘What was it for?’ I wailed; because I always want to know what things are for. Hector consulted his guidebook again. ‘Sun disc. Or birthstone. And later, people used to crawl through to cure their ills.’
Mrs Bolitho got up from where she had been resting against one of the posts, and thumped her palm down on the Mên-an-Tol. ‘Old stone cunt,’ she said, and chuckled.
When the characters crawled through the birthstone odd metamorphoses started happening to them… And the novel goes on as a piece of black magic realism…
The sicker one gets in the head the more fantastic life one lives.
January 24, 2018
D.M. Thomas’s first novel (published after his second) is somewhere in between the one-star review here “Self indulgent, sleazy, and self regarding horseshit [sic]”, and the five-star one “insightful and light-handed [sic] whilst remaining relevant”. Set in Cornwall with an overweight middle-aged tourist who leeches on to an incestuous mother and son who take on various sordid sexual intrigues, sometimes featuring Cornishmen who say “my lover” in that comedy way, and who change their ages from elderly to sprightly, across landscapes with standing stones, the novel is a mixture of the hilarious and the tedious. Fortunately, since Thomas billed the novel as a comedy, and the humour is robustly weird and perverted, the book is a fun read that should be named The Official Novel of Cornwall for all time. The 2nd half meanders and peters and wheezes, hence the three.
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November 20, 2025Thomas' White Hotel was quite the cult favourite back when I read it, around the end of the last century – smart enough to provide embarrassed pre-internet teens a little deniability for how mucky it was, for one thing. But the only thing I've read of his since was his account of the labyrinthine efforts to make a film of that, and when he died a couple of years back, so far had he fallen from awareness that I learned the news via an obituary in a physical newspaper. As such, it would be tempting to conclude that, now I've finally read another of his novels and been deeply underwhelmed, it might be a sign that I'm too old and he's too old-fashioned. I'm not so sure; this was his first book, albeit in revised form here, and in its mirrorings and shifts of identity, it often felt like a prototype, a roughly executed version of what he'd pull off so much better a few years later. In places it's as if he lacks the courage of his convictions, maybe needs magic realism to bed in a little more around him before he can commit to it. Or maybe he's plain indecisive; we begin with narrator Jo on a coach trip with mother and son Lola and Hector, until Lola starts acting younger and younger while Hector becomes ever more decrepit, and the story then goes through a convoluted series of reveals where their relationship is incestuous, except then it's not after all, except then it is after all but he doesn't know. This sort of hall of mirrors can be effective, but here it wasn't, simply exasperating. See also Jo's multiple personalities, though maybe I'm spoilt for that as a plot device by too many Moon Knight comics using it with aplomb. The book's not totally without appeal: Thomas is good on the beauty and oddity of his native Cornwall, and there's a particularly lovely passage about lighthouses. Plus there's definitely something wise weaving through about how much of who we are is the ineradicable working out of chance childhood incidents. But all that is outweighed by too many dreadful sex scenes, too much authorial dithering, and the immortal line "My farts and Lola's called to each other – I'd learnt to recognize her mellow saxophone tone. Simon's were rarer, a curt tuba. Had the fog-horn been blowing it would have been a spectacular quartet, but the sky was clear and starry – I wandered to the window once to look out."
April 8, 2015
Horrible. Self indulgent, sleazy, and self regarding horseshit redeemed only very slightly by containing one of the very few accurate written representations of Cornish dialect that I have encountered in fiction.
November 11, 2013
Review from http://cornishlit.wordpress.com/
So I wrote in March last year. In the 1980’s, for probably the only time, Cornish writers were the recipients of critical acclaim and sales recognition as never before or since. It was during this time that Rosamunde Pilcher made the break from Mills & Boon writer to international bestseller, with the widely praised The Shell Seekers, a book later adapted for television in several different countries. The Cornish setting of that book was overt but the Cornishness of D.M. Thomas and William Golding, despite each writer’s very real pride in their roots, could easily escape the attention of any reader. Both writers were as commercially successful (give or take a million or so books!) as Pilcher and yet they met with even more critical acclaim than she did. Golding, still most famous for his debut – Lord of the Flies, won both the Booker (for Rites of Passage) and the Nobel prizes in that decade while Thomas was also shortlisted for the former with his novel The White Hotel.
Thomas stopped writing novels at the end of that decade and returned to his first love, poetry. Recently perusing his website I was interested to see that he had embarked on a project in 2010 to read all of his own novels: something which he had famously never done for any of them since publication. Imagine my surprise then, on reading this sentence in his overview of the project: “Pleasant surprises: The authentic working-class Cornishness in 'Birthstone' --far from the imported 'Cornishness' of a Du Maurier”2. Birthstone was only Thomas’s second published novel and certainly not his most famous, perhaps that is why I had missed it? Thomas goes on to say of his his reading:
So, what to make of it? In light of Thomas’s revisions, I should first make plain that the copy I read is the revised edition, although oddly published by Gollancz and not Penguin.
There are, indeed, still quite a few bodily fluids - blood, piss, sperm - you name it, it's here. It has to be said that there's also a hell of a lot of rather kinky sex, although not written to titillate. Both these aspects feed into the Freudian aspect of the novel, which is strong. The protagonist is schizophrenic, often losing several days at a time to one of her many other personalities. These consume her consciousness, leaving her with no memory of her actions (or, rather, of her alter-egos' actions) and an inordinate amount of Irish-Catholic guilt. Yes, the novel may be Cornish but the protagonist is not. I've noted in past reviews that the outsider is a familiar and useful character through which to explore notions of identity and here we have several. Given Thomas's comments, above, perhaps it's fairer to read this novel in those terms than the last time I did so. Here, there are several outsiders and each contributes to the novel in a different way.
The protagonist I have mentioned - she is our window into this world and the vessel through which we explore ideas of psychological problems and Cornishness. A second, minor, character is an Oxford academic who is presented as starchy and aloof - a clear contrast to the other characters that helps to underline 'the otherness of Cornwall', to borrow a phrase from Bernard Deacon and Philip Payton. Superficially, this character and the next two I'll mention could be taken to be lazy stereotypes but they're saved from this fate by superb writing: even the smallest dramatis personae come to life on the page, made substantial by Thomas's prose. The final two outsiders are arguably the two largest and most important members of the cast beyond the protagonist: an American tourist couple with whom she stays. From Grass Valley, the Bolithos are here to visit 'the old country':
The Bolithos, of course, represent a distinct aspect of Cornishness - the diaspora. Although earnest they are not so much seeking their roots as embracing them - they sing the same hymns after all. From their point of view, they are Cornish and see no impediment to their fitting in locally and having a good time. The diasporic theme is further explored through the character of Frank Wearne, who has travelled the world, working down the mines of almost every white settler state and Mexico - a country recently keen (long after this book was written) to promote its Cornish heritage (museums, diplomatic visits and heritage ties) - whose impacts are explored briefly but touchingly. The visitors are staying in Pendeen and, at this time, there was of course an active mine still offering employment in the village. Geevor, though, remains a shadowy presence in the novel - glimpsed but not explored - and most miners present in the text are either dead or retired as if, in the 1970's, Thomas is acutely aware of the shift that is taking place in the Duchy from heavy industry to tourism as a principle source of income.
Nowhere is this better represented than in the Polglaze family: Arthur Polglaze also travelled the diaspora in his youth but is now a successful local builder looking towards retirement in a bungalow of his own making. His wife, Elsie, is that prototypical Cornish mother: a blur of activity as she chatters and bakes; cooking, washing and cleaning for half the village and tourists alike, twenty or even ten years later she'd most probably be running a café or a B&B. When we first meet them it's for Sunday dinner, followed by a service at the Methodist chapel where their son, Tom, is a steward. Tom is a product of this changing Cornwall (indeed, at one point the protagonist describes him as a 'changeling' - a word she uses to describe her own condition) - at once the perfect Cornish son, a lighthouse officer and rugby forward as well as a Methodist steward, he is also a popular figure in the pub, where he drinks and smokes with the best of them, and with the ladies - he's not afraid to take advantage of the tourists.
His old man, he played in the band. Music is perhaps the most overt manifestation of Cornish culture in the book: songs and hymns are sung not just by the choir and by the Bolithos but at every gathering and the brass band is never far away. Perhaps that is a side of Cornish culture, perhaps on the wane, visible only to insiders: I remember seeing an interview with Jack Shepherd once in which he discussed his direction of a Wycliffe TV episode ('Standing Stone'), he noted that brass bands were a theme in W.J. Burley's novels but he felt that a folk band was more authentic and appropriate. Music is a powerful symbol. It's probably fair to say that if music is associated with Cornwall at all these days it's not the communal activity that it once was. Music is though, something to which the poet can relate. Birthstone is clearly written by a poet: Thomas's prose is bewitching; conjuring images and playing with words and references effortlessly. It's also an occasionally difficult but richly rewarding read, dealing adroitly with many of the themes identified in the 'New Cornish Studies' before ever that term came to be used (as well as Freud) in a way that is both insightful and light-handed whilst remaining relevant.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Broderick, L.G., 2012. Whither Cornish Literature?. http://thecornishrepublican.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/wither-cornish-literature.html. Accessed 4/11/12.
2. Thomas, D.M., 2012. Novels. http://www.dmthomasonline.net/articles.html. Accessed 4/11/12.
3. Thomas, D.M., 2012. Novels – Brithstone. http://www.dmthomasonline.net/articles_122938.html. Accessed 4/11/12.
“Golding and Thomas won critical acclaim for their fiction in the twentieth century, but their lack of direct engagement with Cornwall in their work means that few even realise that they are Cornish.”1
So I wrote in March last year. In the 1980’s, for probably the only time, Cornish writers were the recipients of critical acclaim and sales recognition as never before or since. It was during this time that Rosamunde Pilcher made the break from Mills & Boon writer to international bestseller, with the widely praised The Shell Seekers, a book later adapted for television in several different countries. The Cornish setting of that book was overt but the Cornishness of D.M. Thomas and William Golding, despite each writer’s very real pride in their roots, could easily escape the attention of any reader. Both writers were as commercially successful (give or take a million or so books!) as Pilcher and yet they met with even more critical acclaim than she did. Golding, still most famous for his debut – Lord of the Flies, won both the Booker (for Rites of Passage) and the Nobel prizes in that decade while Thomas was also shortlisted for the former with his novel The White Hotel.
Thomas stopped writing novels at the end of that decade and returned to his first love, poetry. Recently perusing his website I was interested to see that he had embarked on a project in 2010 to read all of his own novels: something which he had famously never done for any of them since publication. Imagine my surprise then, on reading this sentence in his overview of the project: “Pleasant surprises: The authentic working-class Cornishness in 'Birthstone' --far from the imported 'Cornishness' of a Du Maurier”2. Birthstone was only Thomas’s second published novel and certainly not his most famous, perhaps that is why I had missed it? Thomas goes on to say of his his reading:
“My first attempt at a novel, after 20 years of poetry only. Fearing I wouldn't be able to fill up 200-odd pages, I threw in all my obsessions, like a mad cook. They included: Cornwall, ancient stones, sex, psychoanalysis, Cornish dialect, stockings, suspenders, my mother, my father, my sister. (Well, the last three aren't obsessions, only memorable figures in my life.) The resultant dish I still like.
Perhaps strangely, it's my only novel where I've 'explored' Cornwall and Cornish characters and speech.
I revised it for the Penguin paperback edition. My editor had said there were too many 'bodily fluids'! There are still quite a few.” 3
So, what to make of it? In light of Thomas’s revisions, I should first make plain that the copy I read is the revised edition, although oddly published by Gollancz and not Penguin.
There are, indeed, still quite a few bodily fluids - blood, piss, sperm - you name it, it's here. It has to be said that there's also a hell of a lot of rather kinky sex, although not written to titillate. Both these aspects feed into the Freudian aspect of the novel, which is strong. The protagonist is schizophrenic, often losing several days at a time to one of her many other personalities. These consume her consciousness, leaving her with no memory of her actions (or, rather, of her alter-egos' actions) and an inordinate amount of Irish-Catholic guilt. Yes, the novel may be Cornish but the protagonist is not. I've noted in past reviews that the outsider is a familiar and useful character through which to explore notions of identity and here we have several. Given Thomas's comments, above, perhaps it's fairer to read this novel in those terms than the last time I did so. Here, there are several outsiders and each contributes to the novel in a different way.
The protagonist I have mentioned - she is our window into this world and the vessel through which we explore ideas of psychological problems and Cornishness. A second, minor, character is an Oxford academic who is presented as starchy and aloof - a clear contrast to the other characters that helps to underline 'the otherness of Cornwall', to borrow a phrase from Bernard Deacon and Philip Payton. Superficially, this character and the next two I'll mention could be taken to be lazy stereotypes but they're saved from this fate by superb writing: even the smallest dramatis personae come to life on the page, made substantial by Thomas's prose. The final two outsiders are arguably the two largest and most important members of the cast beyond the protagonist: an American tourist couple with whom she stays. From Grass Valley, the Bolithos are here to visit 'the old country':
'We've been pronouncing our name wrong all these years! According to the registrar - who's a real dish - it's Bol-eýe-tho! Would you believe it? Don't you think it sounds nicer, honey? From now on we're Mr and Mrs Bol-eýe-tho. Okay?'
The Bolithos, of course, represent a distinct aspect of Cornishness - the diaspora. Although earnest they are not so much seeking their roots as embracing them - they sing the same hymns after all. From their point of view, they are Cornish and see no impediment to their fitting in locally and having a good time. The diasporic theme is further explored through the character of Frank Wearne, who has travelled the world, working down the mines of almost every white settler state and Mexico - a country recently keen (long after this book was written) to promote its Cornish heritage (museums, diplomatic visits and heritage ties) - whose impacts are explored briefly but touchingly. The visitors are staying in Pendeen and, at this time, there was of course an active mine still offering employment in the village. Geevor, though, remains a shadowy presence in the novel - glimpsed but not explored - and most miners present in the text are either dead or retired as if, in the 1970's, Thomas is acutely aware of the shift that is taking place in the Duchy from heavy industry to tourism as a principle source of income.
Nowhere is this better represented than in the Polglaze family: Arthur Polglaze also travelled the diaspora in his youth but is now a successful local builder looking towards retirement in a bungalow of his own making. His wife, Elsie, is that prototypical Cornish mother: a blur of activity as she chatters and bakes; cooking, washing and cleaning for half the village and tourists alike, twenty or even ten years later she'd most probably be running a café or a B&B. When we first meet them it's for Sunday dinner, followed by a service at the Methodist chapel where their son, Tom, is a steward. Tom is a product of this changing Cornwall (indeed, at one point the protagonist describes him as a 'changeling' - a word she uses to describe her own condition) - at once the perfect Cornish son, a lighthouse officer and rugby forward as well as a Methodist steward, he is also a popular figure in the pub, where he drinks and smokes with the best of them, and with the ladies - he's not afraid to take advantage of the tourists.
His old man, he played in the band. Music is perhaps the most overt manifestation of Cornish culture in the book: songs and hymns are sung not just by the choir and by the Bolithos but at every gathering and the brass band is never far away. Perhaps that is a side of Cornish culture, perhaps on the wane, visible only to insiders: I remember seeing an interview with Jack Shepherd once in which he discussed his direction of a Wycliffe TV episode ('Standing Stone'), he noted that brass bands were a theme in W.J. Burley's novels but he felt that a folk band was more authentic and appropriate. Music is a powerful symbol. It's probably fair to say that if music is associated with Cornwall at all these days it's not the communal activity that it once was. Music is though, something to which the poet can relate. Birthstone is clearly written by a poet: Thomas's prose is bewitching; conjuring images and playing with words and references effortlessly. It's also an occasionally difficult but richly rewarding read, dealing adroitly with many of the themes identified in the 'New Cornish Studies' before ever that term came to be used (as well as Freud) in a way that is both insightful and light-handed whilst remaining relevant.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Broderick, L.G., 2012. Whither Cornish Literature?. http://thecornishrepublican.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/wither-cornish-literature.html. Accessed 4/11/12.
2. Thomas, D.M., 2012. Novels. http://www.dmthomasonline.net/articles.html. Accessed 4/11/12.
3. Thomas, D.M., 2012. Novels – Brithstone. http://www.dmthomasonline.net/articles_122938.html. Accessed 4/11/12.
December 28, 2025
One of the weirdest books I've read. It gets a grudging 2 stars for this very oddity, which speaks of an inventive mind, even if its inventions would make the most hardened pornographer blush. It's a Freud-fest of subliminal sordidness, of the ordinary sort that sits within us all, which of course is the revelation... circa 1900. Society took longer to catch-up, with Thomas's 'Birthstone' (1980) immediately following the end of the decade where it had come to its fruition. If Mary Whitehouse had ever alighted on this one, her circuitry would have surely fried.
I'm not prude (although surely we all think and say that) and actually the whole reason I picked this up, was due to D.M. Thomas's masterful 'The White Hotel', which followed 'Birthstone' and got nominated for the Booker. You still wouldn't give that one to your parents, but at least you'd have a pretext for doing so.
My issue is that this largely doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There's a slippery narrative where mothers become stepmothers become wives become... well I won't spoil it, but be ready for your frames of reference to keep on getting rehung. It's hard when you're not hugely enjoying a book to keep finding the ground shifting through a series of dream/nightmare sequences. Like at least one other reviewer on here (found after I'd finished) this was very nearly a DNF. It was only because I was 30-40 pages from finishing this slim and slippery customer that I persevered.
I remain convinced that most things published in 1971-1973 where under the influence of drugs. D.M. Thomas seems to have kept up that tradition with this epitome of the bookish bizarre.
I'm not prude (although surely we all think and say that) and actually the whole reason I picked this up, was due to D.M. Thomas's masterful 'The White Hotel', which followed 'Birthstone' and got nominated for the Booker. You still wouldn't give that one to your parents, but at least you'd have a pretext for doing so.
My issue is that this largely doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There's a slippery narrative where mothers become stepmothers become wives become... well I won't spoil it, but be ready for your frames of reference to keep on getting rehung. It's hard when you're not hugely enjoying a book to keep finding the ground shifting through a series of dream/nightmare sequences. Like at least one other reviewer on here (found after I'd finished) this was very nearly a DNF. It was only because I was 30-40 pages from finishing this slim and slippery customer that I persevered.
I remain convinced that most things published in 1971-1973 where under the influence of drugs. D.M. Thomas seems to have kept up that tradition with this epitome of the bookish bizarre.
July 2, 2024
D.M. Thomas throws everything into the mix, pagan myths, incest, aging, schizophrenia, eroticism, Cornish culture and stirs the pot and out pops Birthstone. It's a love story of sorts, rather twisted really and presumably influenced by Freudian theory of dreams/ sexuality/parents etc. Doesn't fully engage as a novel but it certainly had it's moments.
June 9, 2024
A novel I didn't enjoy at all.
I have read many D.M. Thomas books. He was a big name in the 1980s. His star has since fallen. I only began reading him in earnest about ten years ago. But now I wonder why I have sought out his works with such enthusiasm. Reading Birthstone made me acutely aware that I don't really like his style, his themes, his obsessive tone.
Yet I am aware he has talent.
I thought that Swallow was excellent and I still think so (though I don't remember much about it). I think that The White Hotel is very good, and The Flute Player quite good. As for Ararat, Sphinx and Summit they were nothing special at all, but I read them because they formed a sequence of which Swallow is a part...
I read once that Thomas regarded Birthstone as his best novel, or at least as his favourite. It was his second published novel. I disliked it intensely. I found the characters distasteful, and the multiple personalities of the main protagonist added only confusion rather than ingenuity to the plot, and the 'plot' itself is nothing more than a sordid random ramble over various parts of the Cornish landscape with some dream adventures thrown in and various episodes of perverted 'insight' added. True, some of the wordplay is amusing, but a novel requires more, a lot more, than that to redeem it. Thomas' seemingly unironic and uncritical approach to Freudian explanations for everyday life also irritates me. Perhaps I spent too much time when I was younger with writers who were resolutely anti-Freud (Nabokov, for example) to be able to swallow my distaste for this particular approach to humanity.
After reading the first 50 pages I knew I didn't want to proceed with this novel, but the book is only 150 pages long and as I was already one third of the way through it I decided I might as well push on. Never again will I do such a thing! Life is too short. I will never read another D.M. Thomas book, but don't let me influence you in any way in this matter. You may find grace and beauty where I found sordid nonsense. You may find wit where I found only reasons for annoyance.
I have read many D.M. Thomas books. He was a big name in the 1980s. His star has since fallen. I only began reading him in earnest about ten years ago. But now I wonder why I have sought out his works with such enthusiasm. Reading Birthstone made me acutely aware that I don't really like his style, his themes, his obsessive tone.
Yet I am aware he has talent.
I thought that Swallow was excellent and I still think so (though I don't remember much about it). I think that The White Hotel is very good, and The Flute Player quite good. As for Ararat, Sphinx and Summit they were nothing special at all, but I read them because they formed a sequence of which Swallow is a part...
I read once that Thomas regarded Birthstone as his best novel, or at least as his favourite. It was his second published novel. I disliked it intensely. I found the characters distasteful, and the multiple personalities of the main protagonist added only confusion rather than ingenuity to the plot, and the 'plot' itself is nothing more than a sordid random ramble over various parts of the Cornish landscape with some dream adventures thrown in and various episodes of perverted 'insight' added. True, some of the wordplay is amusing, but a novel requires more, a lot more, than that to redeem it. Thomas' seemingly unironic and uncritical approach to Freudian explanations for everyday life also irritates me. Perhaps I spent too much time when I was younger with writers who were resolutely anti-Freud (Nabokov, for example) to be able to swallow my distaste for this particular approach to humanity.
After reading the first 50 pages I knew I didn't want to proceed with this novel, but the book is only 150 pages long and as I was already one third of the way through it I decided I might as well push on. Never again will I do such a thing! Life is too short. I will never read another D.M. Thomas book, but don't let me influence you in any way in this matter. You may find grace and beauty where I found sordid nonsense. You may find wit where I found only reasons for annoyance.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews