[In the following review, Flanagan offers positive evaluation of The White Hotel.]

This novel by the English poet D. M. Thomas is a book of extraordinary beauty, power and audacity—powerful and beautiful in its conception, audacious in its manner of execution. It is as stunning a work of fiction as has appeared in a long while. If it falls short of its ambitions, as I believe it does, this is because those ambitions are so large.

Its most obvious, although not its deepest, originality is one of form. The novel is an account of the life and death and the state of being after death of an opera singer named Lisa Erdman, but the account is not given in straightforward narrative. Thomas, however, is not one of those writers who, having been informed by the hum of the general culture that “narrative” has fallen from favor, has looked about for more modish equivalents. His form issues directly from his vision, is compelled by his vision, and has two distinct but closely joined consequences for the reader. It becomes literally impossible to respond to the novel without making crucial decisions as to the events and meanings of Lisa's life—without, that is, disentangling the submerged narrative from the manner of its telling, the shifting viewpoints and chronologies, the rich and shifting imagery.

Lisa Erdman's “biography,” told as straightforward narrative, would read something like this: she is born in Russia of a Jewish father and a Polish Catholic mother, becomes a singer, has an affair with a young radical, moves to Vienna and marries. She separates from her husband at the time of World War I and comes to experience hysterical pains in breast and ovary so debilitating that she turns for relief to psychoanalysis, becoming one of Freud's patients.

The pains are in the left breast and the left ovary, which puzzles Freud, for he knows that “the unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist.” This puzzle aside, Thomas's imagined but authentic Freud explores Lisa's damaged psyche gently, resourcefully, peeling back layer after layer of screening memories and resistances, and bringing her at last to a childhood vision of mother, aunt and aunt's husband, locked in erotic union.

Freud obtains something like a partial remission of her symptoms, and she goes on to an undistinguished singing career, brightened by a solitary success at La Scala. Much later, the baritone with whom she had sung there in Eugene Onegin summons her back to Kiev, to marry him and to care for his young son, Kolya. He is swept away in one of Stalin's purges, and she endures in poverty. Then, in 1941, she and Kolya, with numberless thousands, are slaughtered by the Nazis in the dreadful ravine of Babi Yar. Her death is gruesome and obscene: an S.S. man crashes his jackboot into her left breast, and a Ukrainian guard ends matters by driving a bayonet into her womb in a travesty of intercourse. After that, though, she finds herself in a Palestine which is not quite the actual Palestine—peaceful and humdrum, despite olive trees and palms and oases, at once matter-of-fact and eerie—where she meets her dead mother and Kolya, and sees, at a distance, Freud himself.

But we experience the novel with the events ordered differently, and presented in a series of disparate textures. It opens with a series of letters by Freud and his younger colleagues, one written in 1909, others in 1920 after he has begun treatment of Lisa. One of these contains a kind of “journal” in verse, written by his patient after a brief holiday at the resort in Gastein, and set down between the staves of a score of Don Giovanni. It is accompanied by an “analysis” which he had urged her to write in “a restrained and sober manner,” but which is in fact a wild, lyrical, irrational embroidery upon her original fantasy.

These two documents create with hallucinatory energy and vividness a white hotel, within which the writer experiences moments that fuse an intense eroticism and an equally intense violence. They remain in our mind throughout what follows, not only because of their overwhelming immediacy but because they articulate images—of breast, leaf, blood, fire, milk—that appear and reappear later, with shifting yet accumulating significances.

They are followed in the text by Freud's study of his patient, Frau Anna G., which was to have been published in Frankfurt in 1932, to honor both Goethe's centenary and the fortieth anniversary of his own Studies in Hysteria. With the coming of the Nazis, however, the project was abandoned. A footnote reminds us that his works were burned on a bonfire in Berlin—one of the novel's many fires, some real and some hallucinated. The “study” is a model of affectionate impersonation, capturing both Freud's civilized, humane, even faintly philistine social attitudes and his daring, courageous understanding of the individual psyche. Within it, Lisa Erdman's fantasy of the white hotel, with its blissful images of oral gratification, its violently destructive counterimages, is artfully joined to her painfully remembered past. The white hotel unlocks for her what she perhaps remembers as happening long ago in a summer house in Odessa, and the “case” is “solved.” The hotel, which “speaks in the language of flowers, scents, and tastes,” is the place without sin, the body of the mother. From this study, the novel moves forward to a deceptively conventional third-person narrative that carries Lisa to Babi Yar and beyond.

By then, however, the reader has been made uneasily aware—by image, symbol, reference, by the novel's very structure—that far more has been at stake than Lisa Erdman's damaged psyche. The fate of our culture has been implied—a culture which has embraced a Mozart, a Goethe, a Pushkin, a Freud, but also a Hitler, a Stalin, the bayonet of a Ukrainian guard. Lisa has been presented as a woman of average impulses and affections—her history no more bizarre than the secret psychic history of any of us—and of only average, unreflecting intelligence. The history of our age has touched her life at each of its stages, indeed her life is destroyed by our history, but that history has not touched her conscious mind.

It has its image, however, within her unconscious, although, of course, neither Freud nor she herself is aware of this. The full weight of the novel rests upon this irony. Freud's insights, so the novel implies, can carry us to the very edge of what can be apprehended and conquered by the rational, humane intellect. But those very symbols that have yielded themselves to the rational intellect also bear meanings, significations, prophecies, which lie beyond the humane and must be called, for want of better words, spiritual, demonic, angelic. Neither Lisa Erdman nor her supremely rational physician can know that her breast and ovary ache not from a remembered sorrow but from a violation which lies waiting in her, and our, future. Still less can they know, or would they believe, that the mother's consoling breast, the white hotel, awaits her after death, by the waters of Jordan.

This expansion of imagery and structure from the fate of an individual to the fate of the culture itself is a dazzling accomplishment, but it has exacted a price. To persuade us of its authenticity, Thomas has gifted Lisa Erdman with what Freud calls telepathic powers. She herself calls it second sight—an ability to discern in others anxieties that lie below the level of consciousness, to foresee, without understanding, the future. By this device, Thomas hopes to validate the meanings of his symbols as not merely private but communal and, ultimately, apocalyptic. But the device remains a device, a willed literary artifice that demands, but cannot fully claim, our assent. And at the end we are left with a “solution” more esthetically satisfying, perhaps, than that of the rational psychologist, but just as arbitrary. Thomas is no less imprisoned by the conditions of his art than was Freud by his. His deepest theme, the joined threads of desolation and joy, is communicable only through images that are mute save in their power and their beauty, his “explanation” imperils both of these qualities.

The White Hotel seeks to fuse the sufferings of an individual with the horrors of this unspeakable century, and to suggest, by radiance of image and form, that all of them can be confronted. It is an impossible ambition, or at least so it must seem to those who, like myself, cannot accept, even as metaphor, a River Jordan flowing somewhere, somehow, beyond the sandpits of Babi Yar. But D. M. Thomas has come wonderfully close.