Farce as the glue

The Holocaust must mean many things to the descendants of the principal actors as well as reluctant observers. The subject remains alive in the literature of Europe and England, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. For the rest of us, removed in both space and time, it is difficult to imagine the Holocaust in terms of a human act of any sort. The horror and the utter lack of humanity effortlessly overshadow any other aspect that historians may care to draw attention to.

Perhaps it needed the imagination of a novelist to push the actual events largely into the background of a story that traces, instead, the absurdities in the lives of those in charge of executing the pogrom. Trouble is, while this may add to the multilayered understanding of a horror the world cannot afford to forget, it also creates a distance that almost seems unethical, an artifice rather than the rawness of a reality that cannot be flavoured.

Amis is no stranger to gaming the Holocaust. His earlier treatment, Time’s Arrow , told the story of a Holocaust doctor backwards, starting with retirement and reversing into Auschwitz. In The Zone Of Interest , he picks farce as the glue holding together three narrative voices from the German management: camp commander Paul Doll, an effortless caricature of anyone Paul Doll could actually be; Angelus “Golo” Thomsen, whose job description is slightly mysterious, and whose glad eye eventually turns soft when he falls in love with Doll’s wife Hannah; and Szmul, a victim who becomes an accomplice.

Using these points of view, Amis slyly deconstructs the actions of the officers, whose grim outcome is never in question, to a sequence of bizarre hilarity. As a counterpoint to this the unrequited love story that runs through the events, symbolising the desperate — and doomed — attempt by the players in this black comedy to regain a semblance of humanity.

But this is not the hackneyed strategy that fiction uses to tell a tale of evil from the perpetrator’s perspective. On the contrary, it builds the argument that the Holocaust cannot be explained by assuming any human qualities on the part of those who engineered it. But what is the source of this dehumanisation? Is it merely the diktat of the Fuehrer — never mentioned by name?

This is where another idea, the brain-numbing impact of working for a corporation, is neatly conflated with the concentration camp. As it happens, a rubber factory is co-located with the concentration camp, and the players in this drama are just like helpless employees driven by a corporate logic they cannot comprehend, while at the same time keenly aware of the lunacy of it all. Against this same backdrop, the three storytellers live out their personal trajectories that intersect in insanity.

Eventually, however , The Zone of Interest gets carried away by its own cleverness. Amis’s dexterity with voice, his skill at using it to depict the character of its owner, and his sheer verbal inventiveness frequently makes the surface of the prose so alluring that the meaning lying beneath does not draw attention.

And at the end, you might well be left asking what the point of it all is, other than compelling the sort of mindful reading that is becoming rare in the age of digital skimming.

An illuminating afterword is a satisfying dessert to this main course. Still, for the best of Amis on Nazi history, read his observations on Hitler’s anodyne sex life instead.

(Arunava Sinha translates classic and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English.)

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