Book review: The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

Can you imagine sex, romance and life-alteringly intense passion in Auschwitz? Martin Amis weaves all three into this daring portrait of love during the Holocaust. The result of painstaking research, The Zone of Interest is his most fascinating novel in years. Even its structure sings with an ambition that has been absent from his recent fiction. Amis divides his tale between three narrators: a preening, imbecilic (and fictionalised) commandant of Auschwitz, Paul Doll, with his “cluelessly staring nostrils” and his obsession with operational setbacks (“corpses are the bane of my life”); Golo Thomsen, a young, dissenting German liaison officer with the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, who seduces Doll’s wife in her villa on the edge of the camp’s charnel house; and Szmul, one of the Jewish Sonderkommandos tasked with disposing of the dead. Szmul’s descriptions of quotidian horror glint with Amis’s eye for the riot of evil: “I am counting charred hip bones before their transfer to the grinding teams.” But it is Doll’s fastidiousness, as he grows mad with the demands of factory-line genocide, that provides the most chilling elements of the novel. This is him overseeing a forced abortion on a Jewish prisoner: “‘Is it just me,’ I said with perfect calm, ‘or was there a whisper of spring in the air today?’” It feels almost wrong to find oneself relishing Amis’s late renaissance in style here: “I was laughed and taunted out of bedrooms, boardrooms, ballrooms,” mourns Thomsen at the crescendo of his heartbreaking tale. Yet Amis’s conjuring of a love story amid the mephitic stench of the death camps only deepens the sense of tragedy on every page of this strange and haunting novel. Jonathan Cape, £18.99