The Zone of Interest, published in 2014, is Martin Amis’ fourteenth novel. Set in Auschwitz, it starts in August of 1942 and ends in April of 1943, with a coda from 1948. Each chapter is divided into three parts, told by different participants. The first, Angelus Thomsen, an officer and nephew to Martin Bormann, is in love with wife of the camp commandant, Hannah Doll. The second is her husband, Paul Doll, who is turning insane and eventually indifferent to the outcome of the war. The third, Szmul, is a prisoner and a member of the Sonderkommando, tasked with cleaning the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies. Though the Thomsen chapters are concerned with the mundanity of all the bureaucratic maneuvering and political backslapping among the officers, and Szmul’s narrative is in its horrific way about the absurd repetition of his work, Paul Doll’s part of the story sinks deep into that man’s jealousy and paranoia, making of him a character who cannot be assimilated by Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” line (which is alluded unknowingly to by Szmul). The Doll chapters are in part a sustained rejection of that probably over-cited formulation, through which Amis insists that in the concentration camp, there were unruled passions, sick humor, and the stuff of all his novels, idiosyncrasy. Doll will eventually die for his crimes, of course, but he has to deaden his own character to survive until the end of the war.
The first subchapter narrated by Doll, titled “The Selektion”, recounts the arrival of around one thousand prisoners from Paris. There is a debacle involving a corpse-carrying lorry, and Doll has to reassure the new inmates by instructing the violinists to start up again. Later in the evening, shaken, he complains of a “splitting headache” and registers the “2 aspirin (650 mg; 20:43)” he has taken for its relief. Amis does not avoid Nazi-mediated German stereotyping; he has Doll comment on his quantitative tendency in a parenthetical aside:
(I like numbers. They speak of logic, exactitude, and thrift. I’m a little uncertain, sometimes, about “one”—about whether it denotes quantity, or is being used as a … ‘“pronoun”? But consistency’s the thing. And I like numbers. Numbers, numerals, integers. Digits!)
But Doll, like all the basest of Amis’ villains, likes language too. This German one inexplicably shares the author’s talent in the English language, though not his aversion to cliché: “it’s a mystery to me”; “meteoric rise”; “I rest my case”; “it goes without saying”; “I just wanted to knock that 1 on the head” (his anxiety about the pronoun “one” manifested). And with that talent he independently produces an American expression which was supposed to guard him against the embarrassment of the day’s Selektion: “Now over the years I have developed a dictum: Fail to prepare? Prepare to fail!” Doll discloses in the same chapter that he has been profligate in his use of Nazi military and industrial resources, that he drinks “liberal but not injudicious” amounts of Martell brandy, and that there are problems in the bedroom between him and his wife, Hannah. Resolving to “tackle Hannah in the morning”, he insists at the end of the chapter that though afflicted with the stress of his extraordinary responsibilities he is whole and healthy underneath: “For I am a normal man with normal needs. I am completely normal. This is what nobody seems to understand. Paul Doll is completely normal.”
If this was too obvious a way for Amis to signal Doll’s abnormality, it’s good that he has set it down early, and can proceed to show as well as tell (“I am a normal man” will become something of a refrain). Doll soon sustains two black eyes. It was, though he blames the gardener’s clumsiness, his wife’s doing; his unreliability will emerge later. The temporary cosmetic change prompts too much of a crisis, making him feel “like a pirate or a clown in a pantomime, or a koala bear, or a raccoon.” He transforms again but into something that can be described, not named, becoming “completely mesmerised by my reflection in the soup tureen: a diagonal smear of pink with two ripe plums wobbling beneath the brow.” Doll, like Keith Talent in London Fields and Lionel Asbo in the titular novel that preceded The Zone of Interest, is vain as well as insecure; he notes that at dinner “even Romhilde Seedig seemed to be suppressing a titter.” His discovery of Hannah’s correspondence with Angelus Thomsen seems to make permanent his now not quite recovered visage, giving him nighttime visions of “ a gigantic black toad with illuminated veins”. Plain jealousy over his wife’s possible unfaithful thoughts, despite his own infidelities, leads him to speculate for his own reassurance that Thomsen, against his reputation, is homosexual, and, by association, part Jewish. This is all to be contrasted unfavorably with Doll’s own Herrenvolk valor, and, by association, virility; he has two Iron Crosses from the First World War. But Hannah has another young soldier in her past, another obsession of Doll’s, and the frustrated husband has resorted to having a two-way mirror installed so that he can watch her while she uses the bathroom. This is all despite his claim that “The German male is in complete control of his desires.”
Doll’s optimism about German victory at the Volga and suzerainty over the entire West serves Amis’ ironic purposes with a side of smug. It is suggestive too of the willingness to take the party line, and the words of Hitler “The Deliverer”, as a kind of insanity, when sincere. Preparing to boast and crow, Doll insists that “National Socialists never boast or crow.” He approves the plan for slaughter upon victory at Stalingrad, calling it “due tribute to the scale of the Aryan offering”, and beyond, an exhortation to “purify as we pacify”. But Doll’s convictions are weaker than he claims, and there is an impulse to disclose this too. With the arrival of another batch of prisoners comes a brief squall that suggests ambivalence: “I had been latched on to by a little girl of 4 or 5. My reaction was strangely slow in coming (to rear back with a snarl); I stifled it, and was able—with great effort and greater unease—to do my duty and go on standing there as required.” He and Hannah do have two young daughters.
We learn that before the action of the novel, on the previous Reich Day of Mourning (November 9th) Doll had a more introspective, and lengthier weak spell. After a heavy and spirited lunch at the Officer’s Club, he awakes from a nap, dry-mouthed, and hasn’t the insanity or ideology to ward away the troubling questions. He asks himself, “If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad?”, and “Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child?” He remembers a propaganda placard on the wall of his office, a bit of German keep calm and carry on, but it asks too much of him: “The questions I asked myself on the Reich Day of Mourning: they must never recur. I must shut down a certain zone in my mind.” The obvious Holocaust question, “How could this have happened?” may be a banal one, but Amis will admit in the Afterword not to have made any progress answering it. That part of Doll’s mad mind is the primary zone of interest (the secondary, perversely related, might be Hannah’s busen), and its shutdown seems like the most basic given in an elaborated explanation for all the slaughter. And it’s given almost exactly halfway through the novel (a nested doll/Doll). Doll ironically becomes himself (a doll, dear reader) when in an even deeper brandy haze he realizes what that shutdown will leave him:
That night I woke up and my face was completely numb—my chin, my lips, my cheeks. As if drenched in novocaine. I rolled off the divan and dipped my head beneath my knees for an hour and a 1/2. It didn’t help. And I thought, If any girl or woman kissed my rubbery cheeks or my rubbery lips then I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
Like a dead leg or a dead arm. A dead face.