Martin Amis, Literature And The Holocaust

In Bruegel`s painting The Triumph of Death, an army of skeletons cavorts on a blasted and desolated landscape: over there, the rustic fishpond clotted with filth and corpses here, the dinner party ruined, and a lady`s waist is girdled in a grinning stick-figure`s arms a skeleton ebulliently disports himself with a fiddle. It`s a little fiesta of death, a brutal and wry vignette of the Last Judgment in all its febrile absurdity. It is terrible and dramatic. It is also, somehow, quite beautiful. It`s art.

Auschwitz, that other triumph of death, had no truth or beauty. The eschatology begun in 1941 for the Jewish nation was, by comparison with Brueghel`s painting, orderly and punctilious, and - this is its terror - it was boring. It simply happened, and happened, and happened. A vast bureaucratic machine at enormous effort and cost, and to the detriment of its military goals, carefully manufactured the deaths of at least 6 million Jews and other categorised un-peoples. Their demolition was performed systematically, according to staff numbers and schedules: it was for this reason that Hannah Arendt called Auschwitz a "corpse factory". A modern, reasoned, diligent production line conjoined to sadism and nihilism and blood-thinking - this compound is what made the Holocaust so singular and lethal.

And it is also what makes the Holocaust so difficult to pivot fiction around. "Hier ist kein warum", Primo Levi was told on arriving at Auschwitz: here there is no "why". The victims of the Holocaust were denied all will but without the exercise of will, there is no drama. The accounts of survivors are, by definition, exceptional. Most people were killed quickly, and quickly forgotten. What is worse, the Holocaust almost entirely lacks the necessary constituent of the tragic, in the Greek sense - resistance. And this sleepless fact is itself a major artistic problem, whether or not one holds with Adorno that any artistic catharsis, any explication of the inexplicable, is a historical injustice. Confronting the Holocaust, there occurs an unwilling suspension of belief. It is both unbelievable and true - the obverse of fiction`s usual metaphysic. Leave morality aside (if we may). What story is there? What redemption, irony, love? What tears can literature bring that history hasn`t already shed? And what, to be terribly old-fashioned, are the limits of fiction`s moral capacity?

Martin Amis might not be the first author one would expect to pray in aid. And yet, he`s spent several decades considering the nature of evil. It feels odd to say that of a comic writer: as though probity must always be solemn and, ex hypothesi, humour must always be frivolous. But, with his little italic licks and bodaciously adverbial prose, with his Dickensian overstatement and Martian outsights (in London Fields: "The rain made toadstools of the people on the street. Faceless stalks in mackintoshes, beneath the black flowers of their umbrellas."), with The War Against Cliché and the attempt to make style a sufficiency of content, Martin Amis has always been a lyrical polemicist searching for a moral cause. In Einstein`s Monsters, he wrote convincingly on the fact that the only thing thermonuclear weapons are a deterrent to is life on Earth. In Koba the Dread, his strange and brilliant treatise on Stalinism vis-a-vis Martin Amis, he arraigned modern writers and intellectuals (many of them Martin Amis, or Kingsley Amis) for not knowing and caring enough about the Soviet mass-murders. More recently, his collection of essays The Second Plane anatomised the chronically virginal Islamist male and his (therefore) tendentious relationship to reality. After all of which, the Holocaust seems an inevitable subject (no serious person thinks about anything else, as WG Sebald wryly observed). Amis has, of course, written on the Holocaust before. But in Time`s Arrow, with the reversal of causality borrowed from Vonnegut, its ironic terror and comedy - as well as its ability to be a novel - came from the Holocaust not happening, un-happening.

The Zone of Interest is, superficially, suddenly different from anything Amis has done before, in style, form and intention. It`s told in the form of three overlapping epistolary monologues: from Golo, the handsome nephew of Martin Bormann (Hitler`s private secretary) Doll, an apparently doltish official at Auschwitz, and Golo`s superior there and Szmul, a Sonderkommando, one of the group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist in killings, and then the disposals of the dead. Tenses, as one would expect, are utilised very carefully and subtly. Doll writes a diary at the time, and until his death Golo gives a morally and stylistically smoothed account of himself, an unspecified number of years after the war and for Szmul, the novel`s moral centre, life is conducted in the shadow of the future, and the past is literally dead: "I live," he writes, "in the present and do so with pathological fixity." That sentence has some weight.

The plot builds itself within a scalene love triangle. Golo - despite the incidental carnage, in which he plays a reasonably large part - has the hots for Doll`s wife, Hannah and the vice is applied versa. As if to invert Celan`s poem Todesfuge, with its juxtaposition of courtly romantic love and Auschwitz (`Der Todt ist ein Meister aus Deutschland`), life for Golo and Hannah begins to imitate the minor French novelists. Ardent letters are exchanged by Golo and Hannah, and intercepted by Doll. A spyhole is used by Doll to watch his wife undress (with much crude notice, thereby, of her `Titten` and `Arschen`). Doll plots to have the cuckold killed ("A Murder in Auschwitz" might have been a grim chapter-title). He fails. He gets drunk. And, meanwhile, the Red Army is ominously doing its stuff, and Doll`s job is becoming rather a drag.

Doll portrays himself in his diary, almost persuasively, as something of a poor sod - an apotheosis of mediocrity, forced to a daily grind of increasingly anhedonic (but obviously necessary) murdering. He is, in the shabby lineaments of his mind, an incarnation of Arendt`s judgment on Eichmann: he can barely spell his endless clichés and evil banalities, which come wrapped in Murdochian inverted commas when he thinks he`s being playful. There are a few slips in this ignorance, though: for example, when Doll taunts Szmul, the Sonderkommando, about his marriage and asks, "Was it a love whose month was ever May?" Now: either Doll is better educated than he pretends to be, and can make casual allusion to Love`s Labour`s Lost (God knows what a nightmare it must be in German), or Amis didn`t expect anyone to notice the theft. To be pedantic, it`s not at all in keeping with the character. Doll`s moral atrophy goes deeper than cliché, though. It inheres in his syntax. In a momentary self-contemplation, he acknowledges problems with "one" - "about whether it denotes quantity, or is being used as a . [his ellipsis] `pronoun```. Doll is a person-manqué. But it`s Doll who exhibits some moral disturbance in his gradual mental breakdown, and it`s Doll who - however nugatory the confession - says before he is hanged, "I have sinned gravely against humanity." This evolution seems true, and it is intensely sad.

Nothing sad about Golo (or "Angelus"). He`s a German Humbert Humbert, intensely stylised and undoubtedly unreliable. "I? I was six foot three. The colour of my hair was a frosty white. The Flemish chute of the nose, the disdainful pleat of the mouth, the shapeful pugnacity of the chin.", and so on down to "the extensile penis" and "calves Michelangelan". In his own words, Golo is among the "minor obstructors", simply a morally-average Golo in a bad situation by the incidental details of his account, he oughtn`t to have escaped the purview of Nuremberg. Amis` unreliably sympathetic narration of Golo is the most technically excellent thing in the novel. But Golo is also responsible for many of the novel`s intermittent burps of expository indigestion __ we are told of "the Baltic lands of Latvia and Lithuania" (oh, the Baltic Latvia.), and get a long paragraph on "The Sorrows of Young Werther, the Goethe novella so beguiling forlorn that.", and so on. Conversations, as recounted by Golo, come garnished with moral qualms (normally, it is true, on his interlocutor`s side): "`You know they pay for their own tickets?`" "`I heard that they were killing psychiatric patients in Konigsberg . To clear bed space. . For all the men who`d cracked up killing women and children in Poland and Russia. I thought, Mm.".

Mm. But these factual snacks only emphasise the radical unreality of the novel, and return us to questions we raised earlier. The prose is often of Amis-quality, but rarely is the plot or the characterisation believably almost-true. These elements are, of course, given different values in every novel, but their devaluation is somehow felt much more in a Holocaust novel, when the weight of the known reality keeps impinging. Much of the pathos of The Zone of Interest is epiphenomenal: little in the fiction itself, or in the fiction`s straining towards some kind of truth, insists on a reaction from the reader. Rather, such sentiments as the novel arouses belong more to the enormous fact of "the concentrationary universe" itself than to Amis`s very decent, very earnest novel. It is for this reason that The Zone of Interest must belie the promise of the title.