Amis is a satiric vivisectionist with a cool eye and an unwavering scalpel. Illustration by Chang Park / Reference: David Levenson / Getty

When Theodor Adorno declared, in 1949, that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he could hardly have anticipated the ensuing quantity of poetry and prose that actually concerned itself with the Holocaust, still less its astonishing range and depth. The category now encompasses the densely narrated psychological-historical realism of André Schwarz-Bart and Imre Kertész, the Kafka-inspired dreamscapes of Aharon Appelfeld, and, later, the elliptical, deeply original fictions of W. G. Sebald. As the generations of firsthand witnesses give way to younger generations, literary works that confront the subject have often been more circumspect; recent novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one does not look directly into the sun.”

Such circumspection has not been Martin Amis’s strategy in approaching the Holocaust. The Nazi death camps at Auschwitz provide a setting for Amis’s tour de force “Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offense” (1991), in which the lifetime of a Nazi doctor-experimenter is presented in reverse chronological order, from the instant of his death (as the affable American Tod Friendly) to his conception (as the ominously named German Odilo Unverdorben), witnessed by a part of himself that seems to be his conscience, or his soul. Nearly a quarter century later, Amis’s new and equally risky Nazi novel, “The Zone of Interest” (Knopf), revisits the town of Auschwitz, more specifically the Zone of Interest, which contains one of the death camps and the headquarters and domiciles of its Nazi staffers and assistants, a “dumping ground for 2nd-rate blunderers,” as its commandant wryly observes. Amis’s considerable historical research into the horrific absurdities of what he calls, in the novel’s afterword, “the exceptionalism of the Third Reich” is everywhere in evidence. The Zone is a place to which Jewish “evacuees” are brought by train to be used as forced labor or to be gassed straightaway, their remains deposited in the euphemistically named but foul-smelling Spring Meadow. (“If what we’re doing is so good,” the commandant wonders, “why does it smell so lancingly bad?”) In this hellish place, in August, 1942, there are several narrators; none is quite so eloquent in Nabokovian irony as the unidentified narrator of “Time’s Arrow,” but each bears witness to the unspeakable in his own way.

The first of the narrators is Obersturmfuhrer Angelus (Golo) Thomsen, a mid-level Nazi officer in charge of the Buna-Werke factory, and the favored nephew of the high-ranking Nazi Martin Bormann—“the man who controls the appointment book of the Deliverer.” (For some reason, no one in “The Zone of Interest” calls Adolf Hitler by his name; elevated circumlocutions are used.) Thomsen’s commitment to the Nazi war effort is haphazard and expedient: “We were obstruktiv Mitlaufere. We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet . . . but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us.” Yet Thomsen is a self-described Aryan specimen—six feet three, with cobalt-blue “arctic eyes” and “thighs as solid as hewn masts.” A compulsive womanizer and a sexual braggart, he is erotically obsessed with the wife of the camp commandant, Paul Doll—the elusive and haughty Hannah, who “conformed to the national ideal of young femininity, stolid, countrified, and built for procreation and heavy work.”

Paul Doll is the second narrator, a vainglorious buffoon stricken with self-pity for being ill-treated by his wife (who loathes him) and overworked by his superiors (who disdain him). He is responsible for overseeing the frequent arrival of evacuees and their subsequent fates at Auschwitz. Accordingly, he is caught between the demand of the Economic Administration Head Office to help “swell the labour strength (for the munitions industries)” and the demand of the Reich Central Security Department to direct “the disposal of as many evacuees as possible, for obvious reasons of self-defense.” He sits through Nazi concerts calculating “how long it would take . . . to gas the audience.” Amis clearly takes pleasure in throwing his satirical voice into Doll’s rants, as he complains of being stuck in the Zone of Interest “offing old ladies and little boys, whilst other men gave a luminescent display of valour.” Here is a wickedly funny Monty Python figure in Nazi regalia:

And mind you, disposing of the young and the elderly requires other strengths and virtues—fanaticism, radicalism, severity, implacability, hardness, iciness, mercilessness, und so weiter. After all . . . somebody’s got to do it—the Jews’d give us the same treatment if they had ½ a chance, as everybody knows.

As in a stage comedy routine, at times the buffoon-Nazi mask falls away and we hear a startled voice break through, as in this reverie of Doll’s: “She is a personable and knowing young female, albeit too flachbrustig (though her Arsch is perfectly all right, and if you hoiked up that tight skirt you’d . . . Don’t quite see why I write like this. It isn’t my style at all).”

There is little irony, much less humor, in the figure of Amis’s third narrator, Sonderkommandofuhrer Szmul, the head of a team of “Sonders,” Jewish prisoners who assist the Nazis in killing and disposing of their fellow-Jews—“vultures of the crematory” who appear to “go about their ghastly tasks with the dumbest indifference.” Szmul perceives himself in very different terms, as a martyr/witness to the horror: “I feel that if you knew every day, every hour, every minute of human history, you would find no exemplum, no model, no precedent.” Like all those conscripted for such work among the doomed and their cadavers (from whose teeth gold must be carefully extracted), Szmul understands that he, too, is doomed, even as he hopes that in some way his testimony will prevail: