It's hard to characterise the visceral power of this novel. How does it work? DM Thomas plucks away at two demonic forces in Eros and Thanatos and weaves them into the narrative's coarse fabric through the life and eventual death-camp slaughter of one of Freud's patients, Lisa Erdman. In super-subtle narrative crafting, Thomas switches genres from poem to prose to pastiche to give a layer-by-layer back story of Lisa's life as anonymised by Freud's version of her as his case study, Anna G.
Miscarriages and deaths puncture the novel with its violent sex scenes (with Martin, Freud's son, as it turns out) and abandoned affairs mixing oddly with accounts of floods and fires, cementing the sex-death link. Lisa's repressed memories of her mother (she dies in a fire at the White Hotel), who was apparently having an affair with her uncle, entangle the story with complex Freudian diagnoses.
Throughout, Thomas creates a narrative that is both immersive and deeply uncomfortable, with the closing - allegedly plagiarised - scenes in Babi Yar representing some of the most sinister and cruel descriptions of death-camp atrocities you are ever likely to read. Lisa dies there with her stepson Kolya, but she returns to the White Hotel at the end, where it becomes a kind of holding space for travellers to Israel. The hotel becomes a source of historical redemption, though even here there is chaos and uncertainty. Elsewhere in the novel, the hotel is a womb, a symbol of maternal purity, but also a uterine space for the sex-death polarity so central to Freudian analysis to play itself out.
Thomas recreates Freud's deeply humanistic approach to psychoanalysis. He describes Freud as 'a myth...something far greater than even a gifted individual', thus giving his writing the quality of Greek drama or Teutonic epic, with the character of 'Anna G' becoming talismanic in her power to explore primal sexual energies and a superhuman capacity of endurance in tandem with her other role in the novel as a talented, opera singer who never quite reaches the pantheon of the greats.
'The White Hotel' is a deeply disturbing novel, its complexity compounded by the rich interweaving of fictional inset narrative (the Freudian interpretation) with third person accounts of concentration camp horror. Jung is also wrapped into the mix with the curious disquisition on North German preserved peat-bog corpses at the start prefiguring the treatment of corpses at the camp at the end.
The book needs a revisit some time in the distant future. So many threads to disentangle, so much cold, stark horror to confront again, with Freud's own bitter suffering (cancer of the jaw, a lonely London death in 1939 and four sisters killed in the Holocaust) completing this gruelling nightmare novel.
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