Haven’t read any Martin Amis for yonks. This is a difficult book set in or around a concentration camp (although there aren’t many prisoners but a lot of burnt human flesh).
The three central characters are Paul Doll, a stupid but very believable Nazi camp commandant; his wife Hannah who loathes him, and a very (to me) ambiguous character called Thomsen, who appears to be a nephew of Martin Boorman. It is unclear to me whether he is a Nazi or not. There is also a character called Szmul, who is a ‘Sonder’ (Jew, or Polish Jew, I am not sure).
It is a not really everyday tale of the Germans and their slave labour who run this death camp. I can’t really pretend I enjoyed it; the background subject matter was pretty grim, the love affair between Thomsen and Hannah is opaque, and apart from Paul, who is brilliantly portrayed, I couldn’t really follow the plot (if there was one) which covers about 1942 to the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. But I may have missed a lot of subtleties?
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