The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis’s best for 25 years

‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,’ wrote Hannah Arendt of Adolf Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Eichmann was certified as ‘normal’ by half a dozen psychiatrists. On more than one occasion in Martin Amis’s troubling new novel one of its main characters, the fictionalised commandant of a thinly disguised Auschwitz, declares himself ‘completely normal’. He also happens to be an oaf, a clown. We are dealing, then, with the banality of evil.

Set in the months from August 1942 to April 1943, when it became clear that the Germans were going to lose the war and that the Final Solution had better be hurried up, the story is told in three voices. In, as it were, removing the author, Amis disallows himself from indulging that virtuoso prose style for which he is interminably commended in all-too-often faint praise.