The Zone of Interest

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.