The greatest notoriety – and critical and sales success – enjoyed by the writer DM Thomas, who has died aged 88, came with his controversial novel The White Hotel (1981), inspired by his readings of Sigmund Freud and by Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Holocaust novel Babi Yar. Thomas’s novel combined these two influences in a driving, non-naturalistic plot centred on Lisa Erdman, a fictional patient of Freud’s, who progresses through sexual obsession to being shot down by Nazis in a ravine outside Kyiv.
The sex and violence were described in lingering, some said lubricious, detail. Although the novel was variously hailed – by Graham Greene and Time magazine, among others – as a powerful new departure in fiction, and an insight into the dark heart of the 20th century, it was attacked by some as pornographic and misogynistic.
