It isn’t until Doll takes over the narration that the Kat Zet is explicitly revealed, in a scene that incorporates both slapstick humor and utter depravity. Doll is greeting a group of camp inhabitants newly arrived from Paris, one of whom, “a little bent old lady,” loudly scolds him for the incoming train’s lack of a restaurant wagon. “All we had were the cold cuts we’d brought with us,” she tells him, indignantly. “And we almost ran out of mineral water!” She’s promptly taken out back and shot by Senior Supervisor Grese, but not before a truck drives past and an accidental gap in its tarpaulin gives the assembled group a glimpse of its load. Thomsen’s friend Boris recalls the scene later, the “starveling corpses. Covered in shit, and filth, and rags, and gore, and wounds, and boils. Smashed-up, forty-kilo corpses.” Doll panics at the prospect of a riot at such a sight, but then realizes that “our guests were utterly incapable of absorbing what they had seen.”

So, in a ghastly way, are the hosts. Amis comes back again and again to the disconnect between the reality of the camp and the blinkered doggedness with which its command conducts its daily business: How could so many people manage to carry on even while registering what was impossible to ignore? (The smell, we’re told repeatedly, is intolerable, even in towns several miles away.) Thomsen obsesses over his infatuation with Hannah, gets drunk with Boris, and goes about ordering “this much cement, this much timber, this much barbed wire,” but he finds himself staring out the window at “the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, adminstrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.”

Doll, meanwhile, spends his days worrying about budgets, his constant failures to persuade his wife to have sex with him, the zombie-like state of his underling, Szmul, and the practicalities of disposing of the corpses of 102,000 people. It’s in his description of these inconvenient remains that Amis’ gifts as a virtuosically vivid writer are employed to full, rancid effect. “The pieces have started to ferment,” Doll acknowledges, describing rotting body parts discarded in a field known as the “spring meadow.” Later, he suffers “one of those cloacal dreams that all of us have from time to time—you know, where you seem to turn into a frothing geyser of hot filth.” Even further on, he describes the “pieces” as “spitefully massive, uncompromisingly ponderous and unwieldy, mephitic sacs or stinkbombs just raring to explode.”

It’s Szmul, of course, who has no recourse to euphemisms or distractions as he devotes his days to the endless disposing of corpses. His chapters are the briefest, and the most heartbreaking. Szmul’s first sentence invokes a fairy-tale magic mirror that shows those who look into it the essence of their soul—who they really are. No one can stand to look at it for more than 60 seconds without turning away. “I find that the KZ is that mirror,” he says. “The KZ is that mirror, but with one difference. You can’t turn away.” The thought is echoed by all three narrators: Blindness is a solace denied to each of them. “It’s true what they say here in the KL: No one knows themselves,” says Doll. “Who are you? You don’t know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest and it tells you who you are.”