Amis’s new Holocaust novel bracingly weird
Variously billed as a comedy and a love story, Martin Amis’s new Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest, is a traditional historical novel — and a surreptitious act of class war. The setting is Kat Zet III, familiar to readers of Amis’s 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow, and of history, as a branch of Auschwitz. It’s the part financed by I.G. Farben, which researched and attempted to produce synthetic rubber and fuel within the complex where thousands of Jews were being gassed and cremated.
All this industry provides a number of logistical difficulties for the camp’s alcoholic Kommandant, Paul Doll, one of the novel’s three narrators. What to do when the bodies contaminate the water? How to make the fire catch when so many of them need to be burned? How to explain the smell to the locals? Meanwhile, he becomes convinced his wife, Hannah, is having an affair with Angelus Thomsen (narrator number two), a lithe Aryan lady-killer protected in all things by the fact that his uncle is Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary.
The third viewpoint comes from Szmul, one of the “special” forces made to work in the camps — a Jew saved only to be made to dispose of others. Szmul’s narration is the briefest, the most serious and dauntingly spare.
The putative love story, between Thomsen and Hannah, is mainly platonic lust, and on lust, as you might expect, Amis is excellent: Thomsen’s wandering eye and hands, so unchallenged as to breed ennui; Doll’s rigid repression, itself lascivious as he describes what he thinks he does not want.
Doll becomes more grotesque as the book progresses, a “fat and hairy old housefly.” He drinks, he smells of vomit, he makes jokes in dazzlingly poor taste.
“The crewcut’s most becoming,” he says when chatting up a prisoner, “and is that your phone number? Just joking. Nicht?”
Thomsen is transformed by something like love for Hannah into his former, feeling self. We learn, gradually, that he is not merely one of the millions of foot-dragging recruits to National Socialism (though he is that too), but a cultivated figure who reads Thomas Mann in secret.
One of the central questions of this territory is whether or not it was commonplace to contribute to the Final Solution, and in Amis’s rendition the banality of evil has its water-cooler moments. “Are you going to the thing on Monday?” one officer says to another in Bunker 13, “It’ll be colder than a witch’s tit.” When told about the body count, Doll responds as if being overcharged at the corner shop: “That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?”
Amis has described himself as a “hereditary novelist.” He was talking about the sense that his status is unearned — passed down from his father — but you might think of the comment in another context, as you notice the old-fashioned formal game he’s playing. In Time’s Arrow he told the story of a camp doctor backward; 23 years later, he returns to the material, with a less clever conceit, more vocal ambition and more recklessness too, since the book’s traditional nature only highlights the strange faith we’ve all put in the conventions of fiction.
For instance, when the widow Bormann says she’s been told that English is a “hideous language,” Amis blithely expects to suspend our disbelief about the language in which she has said it.
Could Amis do a better job of making us forget how artificial all this is, especially when so many histories and memoirs have already been written about his subject? Probably. But then he wouldn’t be Martin Amis. Amis’s way is to be there all the time, whoever’s doing the narrating. Behind all this: the unmistakable sound of Martin Amis having fun.
But he is also doing something bracingly weird. Once he’s made the decision to write about Germans in English, Amis’s near-perfect pitch carries radical implications about class.
Amis never makes an explicit point about the echoes the Holocaust might find in current events, but with tiny inflections of entitlement he effectively suggests something fundamental: that there are people who think they have a right to live at the expense of others, that the ruling classes are disinclined to question their assumptions, and that no matter how arbitrary the victims, the perpetrators will always find a logic.