"Time's Arrow" (1991) has the dual claim of being the midpoint novel in Martin Amis' 40-year career and, arguably, its artistic high point. "I moved forward" are the book's opening words, but the reverse is true: This is the story of a Nazi war criminal — told backward. Auschwitz turns out to be a camp in which Jews are healed and created, where "the weak and young and old were brought from the Sprinkleroom to the railway station, as good as new."

Twenty-three years later and Amis has returned to the Holocaust. In "The Zone of Interest," time flows in the right direction — that is, we watch as history is atrociously made. Once again, events come to us largely from the jaundiced and cockeyed point of view of Nazi officers. Unsurprisingly, none of them emerges as a hero, or even an anti-hero. Instead, Amis rigorously skewers their misguided ­ideals, monstrous intent and preening vanity in an ingenious and mordant satire punctuated with scalpel-sharp wit.

Three characters steer the novel. Golo Thomsen is an "arctic-eyed" officer and serial seducer, "a tremendous scragger of the womenfolk." When not building on or tapping into his "extensive carnal knowledge," we see him dancing to the tune of Martin Bormann, his uncle and Hitler's private secretary, or listening to the gung-ho banter of his fanatically nationalist blood brother Boris. The second perspective is that of Paul Doll, the slovenly, lascivious and alcoholic camp commandant, who regularly bewails his lot ("corpses are the bane of my life") and relies on booze to steady his nerves and stiffen his resolve when decreeing which new arrivals will live or die. Finally, there is Szmul, one of the Jewish inmates tasked with herding prisoners into gas chambers, then disposing of their bodies. "As well as being the saddest men who ever lived, we are also the most disgusting."

Nothing bordering on a unifying plot emerges, but through the systematic cruelty and the bureaucratic ordeal of managing a war trickles a love story of sorts between Thomsen and Doll's beautiful wife, Hannah (the camp's "first lady"). Readers ready to dismiss any kind of staged romance in such a hell as tasteless or unconvincing should note that this is Amis at his most audacious and pungent.

No sooner have we shown a hint of compassion toward his characters than we are jolted, chastened and reminded of exactly where we are. Moments of feigned calm and normality are shattered by offstage screams and gunshots, by fleeting but arresting descriptions ("Men the shape of gnawed wishbones") or by the arrival of the next packed trainload of victims ("Vertical sardines … with toddlers and babies slotted in at shoulder height").

As ever, sympathetic characters are in short supply. But Amis compensates, and shows he is still the scourge of cliché and the supreme man of letters, by dazzling us once more with verbal dexterity and gutsy inventiveness.

Martin Amis

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.