Martin Amis’ novels are the lairs of monsters monsters such as John Self, the jet-setting boozer, chan smoker and porn addict who narrates Money, and Quentin Villiers, the suave socialite/axe murderer who struts through the pages of Dead Babies.
His books are also themselves monstrous. They excite curiosity because they bizarrely combine and skew the characteristics of many genres. The Zone of Interest, his latest novel and his second set in Auschwitz, is a strange melding of romance, elegy, and farce. It follows the lives of three men: Paul Doll, the petty and brutish commandant of the camp, Szmul, a Sonderkommando — a Jew forced to dispose with the corpses of other Jews — and Angelus, a fictional nephew of Martin Bormann, who tries to seduce the commandant’s wife and sabotage the war effort.
Here, it is plain that this veteran of English letters can still shape a sentence more elegantly than almost any other contemporary writer. Early in his career, Amis’ prose was rarely verbose but almost always viscous. Yet in Angelus’ chapters his sentences carry less unnecessary freight than ever before. Take, for instance, the deftness with which he describes Hannah’s movement from the surrounding meadows “past the ornamental windmill, the maypole, the threewheeled gallows”, into Aushwitz. The encroaching menace of the chimney stacks is gestured to so flippantly that one might skim past it. But this flippancy is discerning — it wouldn’t make any sense to stress how horrible the camp is, becausetoAmis’ characters the horrible has become commonplace, even banal.
The book’s comical passages arebitterly satirical, though their narrator, Paul Doll, would not know it. Doll is a megalomaniac, a laughable stooge so utterly convinced that he cuts an imposing figure that he fails to notice how ridiculous everyone finds him. Amis exploits his complete lack of self-awareness to convey how far divorced from reality the Nazi mentality was. For instance, when he shouts at his servant for only bringing him a ham sandwich instead of something hotter, he scorns her for forgetting how stressed he is — for forgetting that “I’ve got a lot on my plate”.
Some of the book’s most morally serious moments are its funniest, but the laughter gutters out in the chapters narrated by Szmul, the camp inmate forced into helping the Nazis destroy his own race. His chapters are the shortest. They are also, naturally, the most affecting. Szmul is counterpointed against Doll not only by his victimhood, but also by his understanding that we prove ourselves moral or immoral by how honestly we speak and write. “I know I am disgusting. But will I write disgustingly?” That is to say, will he be able to describe his disgusting situation honestly? This question haunts Szmul, but also makes him the book’s sanest voice. As the Nazis spiral into fantastical flights of denial about their chances in the war, he remains calm, empirical, sure that he will die but also sure that the Nazis are too intoxicated by their own power fantasies to outlive him long.
The Zone of Interest succeeds because in it Amis is seriously funny — that is to say, funny for serious purposes. His comedy is aggressive, ridiculing the appalling gap between the way the Nazis see themselves, and the way they really are. In so doing, he damns them much more effectively than any pofaced writer could ever hope to do.
