Martin Amis takes on the Nazi death camps in The Zone of Interest

MARTIN Amis has returned to form in his superb new novel, The Zone of Interest, in which he takes on the Nazi death camps.

Amis articulates the unspeakable

UNDER the unlikeliest of fictional circumstances, Martin Amis has returned to form. His new novel is superb in almost every sense. There are the Nabokovian ravishments of his alliterative, lexically alert, bleakly witty prose. And there is the wise and feeling characterisation of his women and men, individuals for whom thought and action are often yawningly distinct. The historical knowledge he displays, the evident fruit of decades of research, everywhere informs the fiction without drowning it in fact. The Zone of Interest swoops elegantly through the closing jaws of World War II.

The only problem is that his chosen subject matter is unspeakable: as in, beyond the realm of language. No poetry after Auschwitz, as ­Theodor Adorno famously put it. Yet the most incorrigibly articulate of major English novelists has tackled a subject that many believe should be met by sorrowful silence. After several feints, the most direct being Times Arrow (1991), Amis has entered the Nazi death camps.

Those readers curled into a fetal ball at the suggestion may relax: there is no vulgarity of the kind that results from a sharp yet unfeeling intelligence addressing a crime so immense it can never be adequately judged. Amis reveals himself as a subtle diplomat of the human spirit in these pages. He has written an astute book full of controlled fury. It is also an arch comedy of manners that relishes the kitsch of that historical moment. The Zone of Interest doesn’t whistle past the graveyard; it sends a brass band marching through.

The novel opens in 1942 in Monowitz, Pol­and: the forced labour camp set up as a public-private partnership between the SS and IG Farben. The Nazis leased out a mainly Jewish slave labour force to the company, whose Buna Works industrial complex produced rubber and Zyklon-B, the gas that killed those inmates too young, too old or otherwise unfit for work at nearby Birkenau. It is a setting with its own literary association: Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi was a senior chemist at Buna.

But Amis inverts Levi’s direct testimony from within the camps. Instead he writes from the perspective of those who run them: the scientists and doctors, the engineers and logistics experts, the soldiers and sundry staff required to keep a workforce of up to 80,000 labourers alive long enough to perform their tasks. What makes this milieu so riveting is that it is not wholly made up of monsters. There are the usual assortment of psychopaths, of course, but there are also women, children and otherwise sane men trapped in the infernal mach­inery of the undertaking. Nonetheless it is a society linked by criminal complicity, its speech is corrupted by euphemism (the Zone of Interest is what they call the camp) and bureaucratese.

The biggest risk Amis takes is to make all this the backdrop of a love story. Angelus Thomsen is almost a cliche of the splendid blond beasts of Nazi mythology. He’s a tall, handsome womaniser and a scion of the senior ranks of National Socialism. His “uncle Martin” turns out to be Martin Bormann, Hitler’s future deputy.

He is struck by a glimpse of a Teutonic beauty with two young daughters — Hannah Doll, wife of Paul Doll, a notorious drunk and the savage head of Monowitz camp (based partly on Vinzenz Schottle, the real Lagerfuhrer in those years). Thomsen knows that the man known as the Old Boozer is a dangerous enemy to make; nonetheless, he sets out to seduce Hannah.

It is a set-up as kitsch as the mediocre oper­ettas the senior staff attend at local theatres. Yet the real passion and sincere feeling the adulterous couple discover has an important role to play. Their relationship, founded on deceit, is the truest thing in the book. It becomes the human element against which the bestial alternative may be seen with clarity.

Amis takes a grim pleasure in rendering that bestial alternative. Just as Vladimir Nabokov claimed the power of the creative artist to show a dictator picking his nose, Amis here paints a portrait of the murderer as ridiculous cuckold. Paul Doll’s interminable celebration of Volkisch values conceals greed, cruelty and self-obsession that can swing from comedic to horrific:

For myself, honour is not a matter of life or death: it’s far more important than that. The Sonders [Jewish Kapos], very obviously, hold otherwise. Honour gone; the animal or even mineral desire to persist. Being is a habit, a habit they can’t break. Ach, if they were real men — in their place I’d … but wait. You are never in anybody’s place. And it’s true what they say, here in the KL: No one knows themselves. Who are you? You don’t know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest, and it tells you who you are.

This is the mystery Amis investigates: the question of how the ideology of Nazism could have inculcated its adherents so thoroughly as to extinguish any empathetic urge or independent moral agency. How could the camp system, whose technological and logistical sophistication was an achievement of which only the modern, industrialised economies of the West were capable, reflect such a profound abrogation of individual rights and dignity of the kind on which the modern liberal state was founded? In the end, Amis gets no closer to an answer than those who came before him: the task is simply too awesome. Perhaps recognising this, The Zone of Interest pulls back at just the moment when the real-world drama of German defeat becomes a possibility. Its climax is told retrospectively, reconstructed from the rubble of the immediate postwar period by a tentatively reunited Angelus and Hannah.

Here Amis leaves open that chink of possibility raised by Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish prisoner in Auschwitz who became one of those despised kapos working the railway ramps, that there is one thing no program of vio­lence, cruelty or extermination may snuff out:

I smile and I think that one human being must always be discovering another — through love. And that this is the most important thing on earth, and the most lasting.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

The Zone of Interest

By Martin Amis

Jonathan Cape, 310pp, $32.95