The Kindly Ones [Paperback]

It is very difficult to write about this much-reviewed book, The Kindly Ones, which won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Perhaps my difficulty arises because as I attempt to write it, I keep finding myself moving too rapidly into superlatives while also conscious that these need almost to be qualified with mental health warnings, such is the impact of this massive work on the unsuspecting reader.

I think I need to say that if you travel with Maximillian Aue through these 970 pages, you will be in the company of a senior SS officer, totally imbued with Nazi philosophy and convinced of his mission to further the aims of his Fuhrer in every possible way. Max Aue is a monster, but also an immensely cultured monster. He is a Greek scholar and a student of Plato, and sees no dichotomy in aligning Nazi philosophy with the highest values of the ancients.

The book is a first-person account, in which Max Aue addresses the reader throughout, and his opening sentence, "O my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened" tells his readers from the start that in his view he is no different to anyone else. He tries to carry his readers along with him, taking as a "given" in his audience what would in fact be evidence of the worst possible corruption. He tries to show us that what he does is inevitable if the world is to be put to rights. The murders and massacres are a correction to a world order which has been allowed to become askew. The Nazis are just carrying out a necessary correction, a realignment which will put things back on course.

As you read this book, you will walk with Dr Max Aue as he leads an "Aktion" in the Ukraine in which 50,000 people will be massacred (the infamous Babi Yar massacre). You will hear his inner thoughts as thousands upon thousands of innocent Jewish families are transported to concentration camps in the most vile conditions possible. You will read of his efforts in setting up the final death marches as the camps were emptied for fear that the advancing Russian armies would discover the full extent of the appalling atrocities that were carried out in them.

And this is just a fraction of Max Aue's deeds during the war. I could write of the magnificent accounts of the German defeat at Stalingrad, or the flight back to Berlin as the Russians advance in a final rout of rape and mass killings. Apart from these "external events", we also have to deal with Max himself, who is not an easy character, being in his own right a murderer and a man deeply damaged in his sexuality.

This is not an easy read, and its sheer scale increases its impact, and left me feeling that this is not a book to be trifled with. Indeed, having written the above summary, I now find myself with that list of superlatives which I have been trying to avoid: magnificent, a tour de force, a novel of immense significance, a new War and Peace, a writer of equivalent stature to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann. The book is audacious: we have read many accounts of the victims of the Nazi regime. Now we hear the viewpoint of a totally committed officer, committed to the will of Adolf Hitler and forwarding his goals with determination and utter ruthlessness.

And yes, Max Aue was primarily an administrator, a trouble-shooter, sent to review existing arrangement and suggest ways of making them better. We read not of the sufferings of the people being shot, but the effects on the soldiers who do the shooting, and how these can be mitigated by using different shooting techniques. Max Aue deals with the internal politics of the Nazi regime, where the discussion of whether to feed or clothe prisoners in the camps depends solely on their usefulness in the factories. If you were weak you died; if you had some residual strength you may be given some rags to wrap around your feet to save you from frost-bite as you stood for long hours awaiting your name to be called.

One can only admire Jonathan Littell for his ability to get inside the head of a senior Nazi officer and I can think of nothing in literature which equals the conviction of this characterisation. It is an almost hideous achievement, but also totally successful in getting inside the mind of someone who's soul has been corrupted beyond he possibility of redemption.

This book is definitely going to be one of the most talked-about this year, as Nazi Maximilian Aue narrates his own story. "Fellow human beings, let me tell you how it all happened," he begins. "If you aren't in too much of a hurry, with a bit of luck you'll have time. Because it concerns you."

The voice is direct and the reader immediately wants to know more. This directness means that it's never a difficult book to read, despite its great length. Aue describes his own experience of World War two, beginning as a member of death squads in the Ukraine, as a soldier at Stalingrad, as a bureaucrat in Berlin helping to organise concentration camps more "rationally", and in the end even in the bunker with Hitler himself.

But the book takes you to places where you ask yourself constantly "did I want to know about this?" Mass executions and burials; incest fantasies and brutal concentration camp scenes. The historical detail is extraordinary, and the five years research by the author has been highly commended by military experts. But all the time you ask yourself "what is this book for? What did Littell write it for? And what am I reading it for, when some of it is so incredibly disgusting?"

This is particularly true of the graphic sexual content which has done the most to inflame reviewers, leading some to label it nazi porn.

In the end, I think that the book is so thought-provoking that it is a great novel. It poses so many questions. And it is certainly great in terms of conjuring up this odd, awful man. I am looking forward to reading reviews by other people because maybe they will have more answers than me; I ended up with only strange, uncomfortable questions.

I am amazed how wrong some top reviewers have got this book. It is a truly brilliant work of European literature, but some of the top people UK newspapers have got to review it have just not got it. First and foremost, the reader should understand that the book is presented as being the work of the narrator - a Nazi. Therefore, his ideas are not to be confused with those of the author. I know it is a basic point, but the review in The Independent just lost the plot, going so far as to say that the claims on page one - self-justifying Nazi drivel were wrong and would hardly be accepted by survivors of the Holocaust! Well, du-uh! The Lermontov motif picked up in the Caucasus phase of the novel is important in this respect - he used the same technique to explore the personality of Pechorin, the 'lichniy chelovek,' in A Hero of our Time. Precisely what resonance Littell hears when exploring this Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the context of the German conquest I am not quite sure, and I will have to re-read Lermontov.

The fact that this novel purports to be the work of the re-invented Nazi should be the clue which explains the aspects which some British reviewers failed to get. The narrator's hang-ups about his parents, his sister, and his gay pick-ups are not some cack-handed attempt to 'explain' fascism via psychoanalysis. They do, however, allow the reader to see how the war and the holocaust were not necessarily the only - or even the main - things in the forefront of protagonists' minds. Aue's mind flits easily from the shooting at hand to an intense reflection on his mother's betrayal. This is not presented as explaining his Nazism, but it shows how the (historically massively important) murder of Jews was actually just one more task he got on with, which was not in fact all that hugely important to him. Revealing his near indifference to something we now understand to be huge, a crime overarching our century, whilst also participating in it up close, is Littell's great achievement.