Unsettling, audacious Martin Amis: The Zone of Interest
In last Saturdays Irish Times (16th August), Eileen Battersby celebrated the "rampaging talent" of Martin Amis and his new novel: 'The zone of interest'.
'For the prose alone it will be received as one of his most accomplished performances'. Martin Amis will be in conversation with Sean Rocks on Wednesday August 27th @ 8pm at Mountains to Sea 2014. Tickets available from Mountains to Sea 2014 website: http://www.mountainstosea.ie/2014-Events/martin-amis.html
Review: A brave, humane novel, set in a concentration camp, takes a hard look the atrocities of the second World War
'A man admits to watching a woman and her two daughters, all three wearing white dresses and cream-coloured straw hats, as they proceed along a tree-lined avenue. The narrator keeps pace, describing the scene as if it were a painting, and sounds smitten: “Something happened at first sight. Lightning, thunder, cloudburst, sunshine, rainbow – the meteorology of first sight.”
Later he confides to an old friend that it had made him feel young again. “It was like love . . . I said like love. Don’t look so stricken.Like love. A feeling of inevitability. You know. Like the birth of a long and wonderful romance. Romantic love.”
It begins casually, two youngish men chatting, lamenting their slightly younger selves, mocking the slightly older superior who managed to marry a beauty, the narrator’s love object. The men could be sitting in a country pub. Instead they have been posted to a wartime concentration camp. Exactly which one it is becomes clear at the mention of Ilse Grese, an infamous guard at Auschwitz who was later hanged for her war crimes. And “Uncle Martin” is not Amis taking a walk-on part; it is a reference to Hitler’s private secretary,Martin Bormann.
As a writer Martin Amis has consistently been daring and original, shocking and funny, and at times profoundly moving. He is a natural stylist and at his best – as in Money(1984), The Information (1995) and House of Meetings (2006), and in the nonfiction of his essays and memoir – he is the finest of British writers, a divider of opinion. With his linguistic panache and wicked humour, his inspired feel for a phrase or an image, Amis is always exciting.
The famous son of a famous father, Amis junior soon outwrote Kingsley. Although the life and times, loves and teeth of Martin Amis have filled many column inches, his work is the real story. His new novel is moral and emotive, a minefield through which Amis moves with a lightness of touch and profound intent.
The great WG Sebald maintained of the inhuman atrocities carried out in eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945 that no serious person could ever think about anything else, and Amis, for whom evil has become a prevailing theme, has taken this to heart. How did it happen? How could it happen? Novelists try to explain because historians have failed..'....
Tara Bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. She moved to England in 2002. In 2012 she completed her PhD research at Newcastle University on Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky. Her poetry was published in the bestselling Carcanet anthology New Poetries V and her debut collection This is Yarrow was published last year.
Nick Laird was born in 1975 in Co. Tyrone and studied English at the University of Cambridge, where he won the Quiller-Couch Award for creative writing. His debut collection, To a Fault (2005), won the Aldeburgh Poetry Prize; his second, On Purpose (2007), the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He is the author of two novels and lives in London. Photo credit: Mark Pringle
Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver(1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax(2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate. Photo credit: Sam Russica
Conor O’Callaghan was born in Newry, County Down, in 1968, and grew up in Dundalk. The Gallery Press has published his four collections. The History of Rain, published in 1993, was shortlisted for the Forward ‘Best First Collection’ Prize and won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Fiction(2005) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Sun King was published in 2013. He has been co-holder of the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University and from 2005-2010 was poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He has also been director of the annual Poetry Now Festival in Dublin (2000-2003). Photo credit: Eve O'Callaghan
Billy Ramsell was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery and UCC. Complicated Pleasures, his first collection, was published by the Dedalus Press in 2007. Well known for his spirited, memorable performances, he has read at poetry festival as far afield as San Francisco and Shanghai. He holds the Chair of Ireland Bursary for 2013 and has been shortlisted for several other prizes. He edits the Irish section of the Poetry International website and co-runs an educational publishing company. Photo credit: John Minihan