“Zone of Interest”: book (2014) and film (2023)
Over on Bluesky I replied to one of those fishing-y questions the people of social media sometimes post: ‘tell me a movie or TV show that was better (bonus points if WAY better) than the book(s).’ Zone of Interest came straight to my mind. The movie is amazing, staggering, heart-breaking. The book is poor.
Having replied on a reflex, I’m now thinking a little more about it. Martin Amis was not an un-talented writer. His first few books are gauche and show-offy, but Money (1984) and London Fields (1989) are pretty good, if uneven, novels. Times Arrow (1991) is OK, though it is a rip-off of Philip K Dick’s brilliant Counter Clock-World (1967) that loses by the comparison. The Information (1995) was, in its day, disastrously overhyped, and there are stretches of that novel that thrash about and don’t work, though there are also stretches that are admirably rendered and overall it is notable fiction. But Yellow Dog (2003) was and remains a disaster, one of the worst novels a ‘proper’ novelist has ever produced. And late Amis — the thin House of Meetings (2006), the wincing, priapic The Pregnant Widow (2010) and the misfire social satire Lionel Asbo (2012) — is basically all bad, in various ways. I do like the non-fictional Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), which finds a useful and occasionally perceptive way of talking about totalitarianism. But The Zone of Interest (2014) is a poor novel.
Jonathan Glazer’s movie adaptation of that novel is a masterpiece.
Since posting, thoughtlessly, to Bluesky, I’ve been thinking about this mismatch. Why is the film so much better than the novel? It’s not a close adaptation, but neither does it entirely ditch Amis’s fiction and go entirely another way.
This is what I think: for all his fondness for what used to be called ‘postmodern’ jinks and twists, for all his show-offy prose (which hits and misses in about equal measure) Amis is actually really quite a traditional, almost a nineteenth-century, novelist. At the heart of what he does is character, in narrative, as a way of construing society in a larger sense. His characterisation leans towards caricature and satirical exaggeration, but then so did Dickens’s. London Fields works because its characters, many of whom are unpleasant, or grotesque, and its (not over-elaborate, but still) storytelling, render its world: 1980s London, the Thatcherite moment. When he comes to write Auschwitz, ‘Kat Zet’ as he calls it in Zone of Interest, Amis comes at the matter this way. The novel swaps between a trio of main characters: Doll, the camp commandant, who is vain, psychotic, self-righteous, proud of his position, venal, unfaithful to his wife, the kind of individual about whom Amis often wrote. Then there’s Thomsen, the manager directly responsible for the camp’s workforce, who lusts after Doll’s wife. Then there’s Szmul, the Sonderkommando officer, in charge of the detail that must actually dispose of the bodies (‘nearly all our work is done among the dead, with the heavy scissors, the pliers and mallets, the buckets of petrol refuse, the ladles, the grinders’) and who is more-or-less a blank because, Amis suggests, one could not do such work in any kind of self-aware or self-reflexive way. Amis’s larger point is that Holocaust worked to compel people to see who they really were, made it impossible to hide from themselves. His Szmul is desperately struggling to avoid doing this.
Glazer jettisons all this. His movie is almost entirely uninterested in character. This is radical, but also profound and insightful. It is also diametrically opposed to what Amis was trying. Glazer’s Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) goes through the motions of his job, running the camp, his role as head of his family, his large house in the grounds of the camp — the film never shows us what happens inside Auschwitz itself, and relatedly it never suggests any particular interiority to Höss. He is an ordinary man: a soldier, manager of a large concern, husband and father. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) likewise goes about her life. She is proud (stolz, as the German language has it) of the way her family has come up in the world, and occasional reflections upon the way wealthy Jews have been dispossessed, and those possessions have found their way into the hands of people like her — a scene with a confiscated fur coat, a conversation with her mother — make the material underpinning of the Shoah clear enough. But that’s not the main focus of her life. The Hösses just get on with things. Throughout, though we see nothing, we hear the sounds of industrial slaughter beyond the walls: the grinding and burning, the sounds of human distress, the occasional yells and angry shouts and orders of guards. It’s so ubiquitous that you almost stop hearing it. When the mass-murder does impinge, it does so in ways that are not fully spelled-out. In one scene Höss takes his kids swimming in the river. Halfway through, he hauls them out in horror, takes them home, and they are all put in the bath, weepingly, to be scrubbed and scoured. We are not told, and nothing specifically shows, what it is that interrupted the swim, but we can intuit: human remains, flushed from the camp into the Vistula.
This, I think, is the key. Amis thinks the Holocaust is something to do with human character, because his whole business, as a novelist, is human character. He asks: what kind of person could perpetrate such a monstrosity? An evil person, or a person whose selfishness and flaws overwhelm their humanity, or a person who works to block out from themselves what they are doing. This is a misunderstanding, of a deep kind. Glazer gets it right. What kind of character could perpetrate the Holocaust? All of us could. Every person. You could. I could. People of all kinds did, and do. It does not require especial wickedness. In fact, ‘character’ is essentially an irrelevance when we consider an event like this. Glazer understands the Shoah in ways other than novelistic ‘characterisation’. He understands that it is fundamentally about what is seen, and what is not seen. That’s what makes Amis’s novel (though Amis was a talented novelist) a bust, and what makes Glazer’s movie a masterpiece.
