The White Hotel

"It is a novel, and one of my favourite books. It begins with an intense, lush, erotic poem. I picked this as my last book because it shows yet another way to use writing to hold the powerful to account. You can do it through journalism. You can dramatise an issue through a play, as in Inherit the Wind . All the King’s Men is a fictionalised story based on real people, and Malan uses his own life story. The White Hotel runs the gamut – it starts off with an erotic poem, there’s a short story, a pseudo-journal entry, letters, but overall it is a novel. And this is the direction I’d like to go with my writing. I like the way you can explore issues through fiction. D M Thomas is exploring the Holocaust, though you don’t realise that initially. It ends with the massacre at Babi Yar, a site outside Kiev where 30,000 Jewish people were killed in one and a half days by the Nazis. One could write that as straight history, though it is hard because of the lack of documentation or eyewitnesses. Instead, the author uses his art to build an emotional impact. It’s another way of telling a story of this great lesson about power that we all seem to need to learn over and over again. Namely, that we must be ever vigilant and never let power concentrate in any one person or institution. Yes. The only system that I have seen where people have really sat down and thought about power and how it can be contained was the founding fathers and the American Constitution and Bill of Rights. That framework was constructed so that no one branch of government could ever capture the other. The problem is that now we have the issue of political funding, and there exists another source of power in the form of corporations. We need to evolve a way to put corporations into that power mix without them having undue influence. “The problem is that now we have the issue of political funding, and there exists another source of power in the form of corporations” Of course, everything humans do is always flawed because “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” [Immanuel Kant]. We are never going to create the great utopia, and it is naïve to think so. What we can do is have a sound understanding of human nature and of what our fallibilities are, and based on that understanding be more thoughtful about how we build political systems."