Martin Amis, who died last year, was always very concerned about his future place in the literary canon. He said that, since the “truth” about writers is only revealed 50 years after their death, they “feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: time”.
In 2002, Amis said that he had “unfinished business with Hitler”. The Nazi world in the middle of the 20th century was something to which his bleak imagination constantly cycled back. John Self, the central character in Amis’s best novel Money , is characteristically reading a book about Hitler as he contemplates the accumulation of financial resources in New York.
A dehumanised environment Amis’s Zone of Interest is told by three narrators, who consecutively articulate their perspectives in each of the book’s six chapters. Amis put a lot of scholarly effort into ensuring factual accuracy for his novel, as the acknowledgments in his book amply testify. But his particular contribution was to get under the skin of history, as it were, and to recover the imaginative landscape that licensed such horrors.
Rather than just an expression of horror, Amis’s novel probes how such “disgusting” practices could have entered into the realms of human consciousness. In Amis’s novel, the relationship between Hannah and Thomsen is presented quite sympathetically. To Hannah, Thomsen comes to seem a “figure for what was sane. For what was decent and normal and civilized.” Though Amis’s Hannah has become part of the Nazi establishment through her marriage, she eventually becomes appalled by it.
Cloacal dreams There are several references in The Zone of Interest to the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift , a famously scatological writer. Doll’s “cloacal dreams” highlight what Time’s Arrow calls the “fiercely corpocentric” universe of Auschwitz: one that is “made of shit”. Amis always took issue with the more polite tradition of the liberal-humanist novel, because he suggested people often do not behave for good reasons. He described himself as working within a looser form of comedy, where “laughter in the dark”, as Nabokov put it, becomes integral to the work of art.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)