The White Hotel’s Scandalous Finale: An Allegory of Reading

Critical reaction to the “The Camp,” the final chapter of D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, has been vexed and largely negative because many readers conclude that the chapter posits the reality of a quasi-Christian deity and afterlife, a position they find both intellectually and tonally at odds with what has come before. However, the key to seeing “The Camp” as both consistent with, and conclusive of, the rest of the novel lies in reading its religious overtones as an extended metaphor for the regenerative powers of literature itself. Once this move from the theological to the aesthetic is accomplished, the last chapter can be seen to claim nothing that the text’s previous sections have not already prepared us for. One corollary of this reading is that any attempt to see The White Hotel as a postmodernist text must be abandoned, since its ultimately integrative structure marks it as reflecting a belated, but unapologetic, modernist sensibility.