Having heard so much about the film, I was somehow surprised to find that it was based on a Martin Amis novel when I spotted this in our local Oxfam. Having never read him before, I grabbed a copy.
It’s written from the perspective of a cast of characters living and working near/in a concentration camp during WW2. Each chapter moves between characters and offers really distinctive insights into motivations, mental states, emotion, hopes, fears… it’s clearly a topic of huge depth, and Amis delivers the full range of both the horror and the bizarre operational mundanity the characters experience.
He shows how even the most sociopathic mindset is eaten away by the sheer depravity of the work, and how conflicting targets from senior officers drive an adminstrative stress on top of the moral, ethical, and philosophical.
It’s a bleak but absorbing read.
