MARTIN Amis tells a little folklore in his latest novel The Zone of Interest: once upon a time there was a king who commissioned a wizard to create a magic mirror. Nobody, including the magician and the king, could look at the mirror for longer than a few moments because it showed people their souls. For Szmul, a Jewish concentration camp inmate forced to work for the authorities, the Kat Zet (or KZ in the book) is a mirror with a key difference: you cannot turn away.

Szmul’s story, though taking up a few pages in the novel, is symbolic; the rest of the novel takes the shape of a brutish comedy of manners chiefly focused on the middle-ranked Nazi bureaucracy. Besides Szmul there are two other Nazi narrators: Angelus (Golo) Thomsen and Paul Doll. Doll is the embodiment of those behind the ruthless and industrialised genocide of the Jews. He is obsessed with his public persona, as a man of great power and influence, and numbers: “I like numbers. They speak of logic, exactitude, and thrift”. He is incapable of understanding social and personal dynamics because they do not follow the infallible logic of numbers. His days are spent brooding over past and present jealousies and resentments, or thinking of the most efficient and economical ways to kill the maximum number of Jews.

Jews are forced to buy their tickets to the KZ under the pretence of providing work and upon reaching, they are divided into two groups: those who are physically viable for labour and those who are too old, young or ill. The latter are immediately gassed to death in specially designed shower rooms with the help of a few Sonders, Jewish inmates forced to kill and plunder their own, and Szmul is one of them. He questions their own role in this horror: “We are in fact the saddest men in the history of the world”. His greatest fear is the idea of going back to his wife because after all that he has witnessed, there is no going back, there is no salvation.

But he believes that their purpose is to bear witness to the truth. Before he buries his testimony in a thermos flask under a gooseberry bush he tells himself: “I cannot forget because I cannot forget. And now at last all these memories will have to be dispersed … with this I prove that my life is mine, and mine alone.”

But it is not Szmul’s narrative but that of Doll’s that is so disturbing, with its methodical approach to massacre, that it chills you to the bone. We see him efficiently making a list of ways to get rid of the dead bodies in a pyre in which “liquefied human fat must be used to aid combustion”. “Corpses are the bane of my life,” he complains to himself. His other main concern is to get rid of the stink of the place that reaches the neighbouring town too. Amis sarcastically names that ‘burial’ area Spring Meadow.

Doll has a weakness that not only clouds his judgment but costs him his career as well. This weakness is his constant effort to subdue his wife Hannah, who does not care about him. Doll, who is always venerating or justifying himself, makes for a bleakly comic figure: “It bears repeating that I am a normal man with normal feelings. When I’m tempted by human weakness, however, I simply think of Germany and the trust reposed in me by her Deliverer — whose vision, whose ideals and aspirations, I unshakably share”.

At six foot three with “frosty white” hair, broad shoulders, a “slablike” chest, and “cobalt blue” eyes, Thomsen (Golo) is the epitome of the supposed Aryan beauty and strength. He enjoys a privileged position in the concentration camp as the nephew of Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann. Although he is precariously employed in a rather shady business, Golo spends most of his time at KZ chasing after women and getting drunk with his friend Boris. However, there’s more to him than Amis let’s on at first. He is shrewdly aware of what’s happening around him: “almost hourly, here, you felt you were living in the grounds of a vast yet bursting madhouse”.

When the novel opens Golo sees Hannah on the road and immediately falls in love with her: “something happened at first sight. Lightening, thunder, cloudburst, sunshine, rainbow — the meteorology of first sight”.Hannah, although she is not a narrator, is the fourth most important character in the novel. With a past affair with a communist revolutionary, she resents not only her husband but everything he represents. She mocks and taunts him but is a prisoner in the extremely misogynistic Nazi Germany where a woman’s holiest duty is to reproduce as many Germans of superior race as possible.

The Zone of Interest is replete with German words with few translations, making it hard for readers with little background knowledge of that era. But if you can get past that, it is a very engrossing book that will make your stomach churn with horror. Amis has written a very important book and it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust, or history in general.

Amis’s novel works like that mythic mirror by uncovering the lives of the Nazis and the inmates alike to show that wretched time in a mundane, often darkly comic, style. The inhuman violence, systematised genocide, individual as well as collective suffering and countless other horrors are joined by ‘ordinary’ human preoccupations like jealousy, revenge, power struggle, and love. Although this juxtaposition might seem senseless, or even disrespectful, Amis weaves a bleakly realist narrative that shows his readers the soul of that time.

“We are of the Sonderkommando, the SK, the Special Squad, and we are the saddest men in the Lager. We are in fact the saddest men in the history of the world. And of all these very sad men I am the saddest. Which is demonstrably, even measurably true. I am by some distance the earliest number, the lowest number — the oldest number. As well as being the saddest men who ever lived, we are also the most disgusting. And yet our situation is paradoxical. It is difficult to see how we can be as disgusting as we unquestionably are when we do no harm. The case could be made that on balance we do a little good. Still, we are infinitely disgusting, and also infinitely sad. Nearly all our work is done among the dead, with the heavy scissors, the pliers and mallets, the buckets of petrol refuse, the ladles, the grinders. Yet we also move among the living.”

— Excerpt from the book

The Zone of Interest

(NOVEL)

By Martin Amis

Knopf, US

ISBN 978-0385353496

306pp.