Having dealt obliquely with the Holocaust in Time's Arrow, Amis returns to study it anew, telling this story from the perspectives of three men employed at a concentration camp.

Taking turns in the narrative are: industrial liaison Angelus Thomsen, Icelandic nephew of Martin Bormann; the officious Major Paul Doll, whose wife is next on Thomsen's list to seduce; and Polish Jew Szmul Zachariasz, allowed to live only because workers are needed to deal with the corpses. With the moral atrocity they're committing lurking only vaguely at the backs of their minds, the officers are men who accord with Hannah Arendt's dictum of the banality of evil. Motivated by pettiness and jealousy, they womanise, drink and scheme, their salient feature a managerial blankness. Imposing the mundanity of the workplace on the scene of such abomination feels on one level like a breakthrough, but it's one that leads nowhere, Amis's depiction of these mass murderers feeling simultaneously truthful yet inconsequential.