At first glance, a vaudeville love farce set in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War would not appear to be a particularly tasteful subject for a novel. Martin Amis, one of England's perennial enfant terrible writers, deftly intertwines a biting critique of the Nazi system with the pathetic story of a camp commandant's feelings of conjugal distrust and inadequacy. Amis provides the reader with a clear vision of Paul Doll's fatally bad faith via the use of a multiple narrative structure which is both a source of chuckles and horror to the contemporary reader aware of the ultimate
conclusion to this war of particularly traumatising significance to the European mind.
The Third Reich does vaudeville
At first glance, a vaudeville love farce set in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War would not appear to be a particularly tasteful subject for a novel. Martin Amis, one of England's perennial enfant terrible writers, deftly intertwines a biting critique of the Nazi system with the pathetic story of a camp commandant's feelings of conjugal distrust and inadequacy. Amis provides the reader with a clear vision of Paul Doll's fatally bad faith via the use of a multiple narrative structure which is both a source of chuckles and horror to the contemporary reader aware of the ultimate conclusion to this war of particularly traumatising significance to the European mind.