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..'....
