Book Review – The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

About the Book

Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll.

As Thomsen and Doll’s wife pursue their passion – the gears of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution grinding around them – Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him.

Format: ebook (322 pages) Publisher: Vintage
Publication date: 30th September 2014 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

This was a book club pick prompted by the recent release of the film adaptation. I haven’t seem the film but I’m reliably informed it is quite different from the book in that, although it focuses on the family of the camp commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the camp is very much in the background – quite literally – whereas Amis takes us right inside it.

This is a very dark place to be and it’s fair to say many of the book club members found it a place they did not want to inhabit and either didn’t finish the book or, knowing the subject matter, decided not to read it at all. I can definitely understand this as there are some extremely disturbing scenes although of course these probably pale into insignificance compared to the reality. There are phrases in German scattered throughout the book without any accompanying translations which some readers also found a barrier. Personally, I didn’t bother looking up what they meant.

Each chapter of the book features three narrators: German officer Golo Thomsen, the nephew of Martin Bormann, who is in charge of the construction, using camp labour, of a factory to produce synthetic rubber; Paul Doll, the camp commandant (based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss); and Szmul, a member of a group of Jewish prisoners tasked with escorting fellow Jews to the gas chamber and disposing of their remains.

Initially Thomsen, something of a playboy, views his position and his Aryan good looks as an opportunity to bed any female he sets his eyes on but he soon becomes besotted by Hannah, the wife of the camp commandant. His feelings for her seem to awaken a sense of humanity in him and they share a growing awareness that Germany is going to lose the war.

Doll is obsessed with numbers, treating his role as something like the overseer of a production line, bewailing the unceasing demands from his superiors and the complaints of local inhabitants about the smells emanating from the camp and the state of the local drinking water. Often drinking himself into a stupor, Doll bemoans his wife’s unwillingness to sleep with him, observing her in the bathroom through a two-way mirror he has had installed. The sections written from his point of view are shot through with black humour as he becomes an increasingly ridiculous figure albeit a remarkably dangerous one.

Szmul knows his survival rests on his usefulness to the Germans but that this will end at some point. The only kindness he can bestow on those heading for the gas chamber is to tell them ways to shorten their suffering.

As I was reading the book, Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the banality of evil’ came to mind. This is mass murder as a bureaucratic operation with every detail recorded, prisoners’ worth calculated in terms of the work they can do versus the calories they consume, the arrival of trains carrying new prisoners meticulously scheduled and the most cost effective way of disposing of bodies argued over. At the same time, there is the nauseating artificiality of new arrivals being welcomed by the camp commandant whilst an orchestra plays in the background.

Many questions arise from the book: How did such an atrocity happen? How did a whole nation allow the ‘normalisation’ of mass murder? How did one individual manage to convince good people to do awful things? I don’t know the answers to those questions but books like this, even as disturbing to read as this one, should make us keep asking them, especially as we look around the world today.

The Zone of Interest is not an easy read but I think it’s an important one.

In three words: Hard-hitting, dark, thought-provoking
Try something similar: All the Broken Places by John Boyne

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About the Author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

He passed away on Friday 19 May, 2023, aged 73.