Perhaps one should not blame the author for such solecisms, but Sir Richard Evans, the former Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, who is thanked in the Afterword "for tidying up several grave errors in the novel's garnish of German". Though Evans certainly does speak German, he has let Amis down, not only as a proof-reader but as an authority on the subject. He ought to have warned Amis off anachronisms such as "kreative Vernichtung" (Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction", an economic concept coined in America in 1942) or "Schreibtischtäter" ("desk murderer", a Nazi war criminal) which gained currency only long after the war. And Evans should also have saved Amis from more profound anachronisms, such as attributing to a wartime German a theory about Hitler (that he turned his hostility towards the Jews against the Germans in the latter stages of the war), which the émigré Sebastian Haffner only published 30 years later.
Does all this mean that The Zone of Interest has nothing to say about the Holocaust? No: it is actually a gripping novel which, for all its unevenness of tone and taste, stands far above most other fictional treatments of the subject. This of course begs the question of whether fiction written long after the event can hope to encompass a world that even survivors struggled to describe, while avoiding the temptation to exploit the insatiable prurience of posterity at the expense of the victims and their tormenters. Though his grim gallery of grotesques cannot be compared to the first-hand insights of a Primo Levi or a Jean Amery, the author has had a better stab at inhabiting the mind of a fiend than, for example, the Franco-American novelist Jonathan Littell in The Kindly Ones. Amis's Auschwitz is no excuse for erotic adventures and his master race does not even have the glamour of kitsch. "Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place," Hannah concludes. The Zone of Interest is an honest attempt to answer the question: "Why?" If it ultimately defeats him, that is because Auschwitz remains incomprehensible.
Amis and McEwan have cast their spells over a generation of readers. We, the apprentices to these sorcerers of sensibility, are growing impatient. But they still have moral sentiments to impart that bear repetition. McEwan makes his judge pay a heavy price for offering a boy "protection against his religion". Her failure to respond to his plea for help, to provide whatever spiritual succour it was that he wanted from her, was a transgression "beyond the reach of any disciplinary panel". The implication of his reversion to a religion that is bound to be fatal is that even a harsh and unforgiving religion may seem preferable to an eager youth with a precarious hold on life to a disenchanted, god-forsaken world bereft of meaning. McEwan does not have to spell out what this implies for the devotees of the Islamist cult of martyrdom.
Does all this mean that The Zone of Interest has nothing to say about the Holocaust? No: it is actually a gripping novel which, for all its unevenness of tone and taste, stands far above most other fictional treatments of the subject. This of course begs the question of whether fiction written long after the event can hope to encompass a world that even survivors struggled to describe, while avoiding the temptation to exploit the insatiable prurience of posterity at the expense of the victims and their tormenters. Though his grim gallery of grotesques cannot be compared to the first-hand insights of a Primo Levi or a Jean Amery, the author has had a better stab at inhabiting the mind of a fiend than, for example, the Franco-American novelist Jonathan Littell in The Kindly Ones. Amis's Auschwitz is no excuse for erotic adventures and his master race does not even have the glamour of kitsch. "Imagine how disgusting it would be if anything good came out of that place," Hannah concludes. The Zone of Interest is an honest attempt to answer the question: "Why?" If it ultimately defeats him, that is because Auschwitz remains incomprehensible.
Amis and McEwan have cast their spells over a generation of readers. We, the apprentices to these sorcerers of sensibility, are growing impatient. But they still have moral sentiments to impart that bear repetition. McEwan makes his judge pay a heavy price for offering a boy "protection against his religion". Her failure to respond to his plea for help, to provide whatever spiritual succour it was that he wanted from her, was a transgression "beyond the reach of any disciplinary panel". The implication of his reversion to a religion that is bound to be fatal is that even a harsh and unforgiving religion may seem preferable to an eager youth with a precarious hold on life to a disenchanted, god-forsaken world bereft of meaning. McEwan does not have to spell out what this implies for the devotees of the Islamist cult of martyrdom.
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