My Bones and My Flute
SynopsisPlot
Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to their remote destination upriver in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realize that there is more to Henry Nevinson’s invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, a wealthy businessman. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay.
Story
About this book
Milton Woodsley, a painter, accepts an invitation from the wealthy businessman Henry Nevinson to travel upriver into the Berbice forests of Guyana. He believes the trip is about producing paintings for the family. Once the steamer is underway, the Nevinsons mention something stranger: they have been hearing a flute player that nobody else can detect. The simple commission begins to look like something else entirely.
Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909, and he gave his 1955 book a subtitle promising a ghost tale told in an old-fashioned way. The wording carries dry humor, though the novel builds real dread as a handful of town people meet forces in the deep forest that resist calm explanation. Under the supernatural pressure sit questions about slavery, individual cruelty, and wrongs that still echo.
The setting shapes the whole book. Barking baboons and unseen movement in the undergrowth surround the visitors, far from familiar town comforts. The isolation of the jungle cottage leaves no easy retreat once events escalate. Mittelholzer wrote twenty-three novels along with two non-fiction titles before his death in 1965, and here he uses a familiar ghost-story shape to look at historical harm.
