Books: The Zone of Interest

This book has been labelled by some professional reviewers as ‘a holocaust comedy.’ This is a striking analysis, since those events would not seem to be particularly fertile ground for comic fiction. Having been hugely impressed by Martin Amis’ previous work on the sombre topic of Nazi atrocities, Times Arrow, I was eager to take up The Zone of Interest. Ultimately, it was a rewarding experience.

This is a tightly constructed novel, events narrated in sequence from the perspective of three different protagonists. Paul Doll is the bibulous, buffoonish commandant of Kat Zet II, part of the greater Auschwitz camp. We hear his near constant complaints about the myriad challenges and petty irritations he must overcome in the day-to-day running of his death camp. Further angst is generated for him by the lust affair being prosecuted against Doll’s young wife by the priapic and well-connected (he is Martin Bormann’s nephew) Angelus Thomsen, an Aryan lover-man and engineer overseeing the interests of IG Farben in the whole murderous enterprise. Finally, events are recounted in the horror-wearied voice of Szmul, the leader of the camp’s Sonderkommando, doomed Jewish facilitators of the camp’s process.

There is humour in the Pooterish self-pity on constant display from Doll; for example, his dismay at being choked off by the Luftwaffe High Command for stoking his crematory pyres too vigorously. There is humour too in the louche romancing of Thomsen in what would not appear to be the best place to pursue a love affair, although he turns out to be a better man in the end. In some regards, however, both are blasé and strikingly self-absorbed amidst the unspeakable horror in which they find themselves. One feels that Amis must, in this way, be capturing the actual psychological processes that enabled such men to live and work in these horrific surroundings. The narrations of Szmul hauntingly and effectively convey the ennui and despair that must have created such biddable automatons. This, then, is no comedy, but instead an effective study of how persecutors and their victims live from day to day. I commend it to you.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2015