The Zone of Interest: the dark psychological insight of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel is lost in the film adaptation

By Paul Giles, Australian Catholic University

Martin Amis, who died last year, was always very concerned about his future place in the literary canon. He said that, since the “truth” about writers is only revealed 50 years after their death, they “feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: time”.

Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest is based on Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name. It will undoubtedly revive general interest in the author’s work. But in truth Glazer’s film has very little in common with Amis’s original novel.

Its use of the same title verges, in some ways, on travesty. The verbal complexity of Amis’s narrative has been displaced by Glazer’s visual brilliance, but it makes for a completely different kind of artistic experience.

Discussing Nazi Germany in a 1992 interview, Amis said: “In many ways it’s the central event of the 20th century, the culminating event of history.” His novel Time’s Arrow (1991), narrated in reverse chronology, begins with a genteel doctor’s retirement in suburban America before tracing his life story back in time 40 years to depict him dismembering Jewish bodies in the concentration camps.

In 2002, Amis said that he had “unfinished business with Hitler”. The Nazi world in the middle of the 20th century was something to which his bleak imagination constantly cycled back. John Self, the central character in Amis’s best novel Money (1982), is characteristically reading a book about Hitler as he contemplates the accumulation of financial resources in New York.

Throughout his work, Amis was drawn to landscapes of cruelty and excess, not only in Nazi Germany, but also the gulags of Stalin’s Russia in Koba the Dread (2002) and what he saw as the dehumanised capitalist wastelands of the Californian sex industry in Pornoland (2004).

His point was that such brutal instincts are woven intricately into the human condition, and that the dividing line between the “normal” and the repugnant is perilously thin.

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