The Zone of Interest
Martin Amis
[Jonathan Cape]
With The Zone of Interest, Amis returns to the theme he first explored in 1991 with Time’s Arrow: the utterly futile impossibility of comprehending the Holocaust, coupled with the urgent necessity to do so. Time’s Arrow is a postmodern telling of the life of a Nazi doctor, told in reverse, beginning with his death. For all the distance afforded by this detached narrative, enhanced by an omniscient but impersonal narrator, it is a devastating book. In fact, the power this book wields is probably because of – not in spite of – this detachment: this is not a topic easily addressed face-on. The Zone of Interest, then, is conceptually a more straightforward novel, but overall a less powerful book in terms of impact. It has as its setting a division of the camp at Auschwitz, and as its central action the non-love affair between a middle-rank Nazi officer and the wife of the camp’s commandant. There are a few minor sub-plots, none particularly worthy of note as they fail to weave together in any satisfying way or come to any real conclusion.
Amis’ main difficulty is with the three sharply distinct voices of his narrators: Officer Angelus ‘Golo’ Thompsen, a morally ambiguous womaniser; Paul Doll, the camp’s desperate buffoon of a commander; and Smzul, ‘the saddest man in the world’, one of the prisoners charged with clearing corpses in the camps. It is the incongruity of these three narratives that make the book as a whole somewhat difficult to digest – the styles are so disparate as to be completely jarring for the reader. There are flashes of Amis’ trademark black humour, but they are few and far between. There are also moments that are genuinely touching or sickening, but again, rarely. The strange dichotomies between fury and resignation and between evil and banal bureaucracy may be characteristic of the challenges faced in comprehending this incomprehensible event, but here these make for a reading experience that leaves one feeling ultimately dissatisfied.
Words: Liza Cox
