Death Zones

By Simon Pasternak

(Harvill Secker, £16.99)

NEVER judge an author by his genre. Simon Pasternak, a Danish author and screenwriter, has achieved domestic acclaim by collaborating with another writer on a crime series. He thus fits ever so snugly into the box marked Scandinavian noir.

Death Zones, however, makes Scandinavian Noir seem as dark as a Busby Berkeley musical. This is an outstanding, troubling, flawed and compelling novel. It seems at first to promise a Nazi detective story. It proceeds to unwind as a modern Heart Of Darkness. It is full or paradox. It has culture and it has artless brutality, both in action and character. It is bleak yet brilliant.

The settings are Belorussia and Hamburg in 1943. The former is the scene of the killing of a high-ranking SS officer and his wife. The latter is the stage for a denouement in the hellish firestorms that engulfed a city. The narrator is a police detective, Oberleutenant Heinrich Hoffmann, a man of poetic sensibility who can be moved by love, literature and music but is not immune to awful infection by the evil that surrounds him.

He is instructed to find the killers of the SS officer and his entourage. The plot, though, is at best a digression. It barely functions as a vehicle to carry an onerous, significant and compelling narrative. There is much about tattoos, twins, stolen gold, double-dealing and insider politics. This all matters little even if it has the capacity to confuse. Indeed, Pasternak, perhaps sensing that the plot details have become as clear as a bar drunk with a lisp singing an excerpt from The Ring through a rolled-up newspaper, finds it necessary as the book races to its conclusion to summarise what has happened, just what Hoffmann is trying to achieve by fleeing from the hell of Belorussia to the large bombing target that is Hamburg.

This gaudy, increasingly convoluted plot is the book’s flaw. In truth, though, it matters naught.

Death Zones is not a thriller of cheap thrills. It is a testimony to evil and how it consumes its victims and corrupts its perpetrators. Based on true events, it is inspired by Pasternak’s family history in Eastern Europe. It is told in staccato sentences, reminiscent of the rattling of a machine gun.

The following is indicative of the book's style and character. Hoffmann arrives in a village with an SS entourage led by a friend who is moving quickly and inexorably onto the deepest, darkest pool of unmitigated evil.

“I study the line-up. Twenty-two individuals. What is left of Zaludok’s Jewish population. In 1942 there were two thousand of them. Before the day is over here will be none.”

Hoffmann’s testimony is simple, without ornament, stripped of any futile justification. A character tells after a later burst of frenetic, routine killing that he is fatigued not by the bloodshed but by the duplicity. He bemoans the “separation from reality” that expressions such as “special treatment”, “liquidisation”, “cleansing” or “Judenfrei” can never hope to induce.

“It’s all killing, Heinrich,” he states without remorse. He is acknowledging the bloody truth that politics cannot justify and philosophy cannot explain.

Hoffmann’s journey in the novel begins and ends with him sitting in a room. To disclose further details would be to diminish the story’s extraordinary symmetry, one than cannot be distorted by that convoluted plot. But the profundity and importance of the novel lies not in the geographical journey between an investigation in Belorussia and a discovery in Hamburg.

It resides, instead, in the portrait of Hoffmann. His story – and this may be no coincidence – echoes Offenbach’s opera, Tales Of Hoffmann, where the leading player believes he may never love again. Pasternak’s Hoffmann starts the novel by writing a love letter but slowly becomes consumed by overwhelming self-hatred. Pasternak’s creation is dreadfully vivid because Hoffmann can be described as a “good man” early in the novel without violent protest from the reader. He seems a feckless bystander in evil but slowly he becomes an instrument of death, with one scene bluntly and powerfully laying bare his awful fall.

Easy assumptions about his humanity are replaced by uneasy realisations as Hoffmann is unable to resist evil and even, on occasion, willing to embrace it. Pasternak does not construct the caricature of a bad guy but instead paints the portrait of how a policeman, who may have spent his life investigating mundane crime in Hamburg, becomes a beast but one who cannot escape conscience or consequence. This is made horrifyingly clear when Hoffmann’s retreat into drink does not offer inoculation from the brutalities he is both experiencing and perpetrating. Rather, it merely increases his anxiety, his nightmarish delusions and the diminishing power of his brutal reality.

How can Hoffmann escape hell, particularly when any belief in an afterlife would strongly suggest he faces a sentence of eternal damnation? The horror, the horror. The heart of darkness in Death Zones lies not just in the authenticity of its depictions of the sometimes organised, sometimes casual killings of the Jewish people. The mind-numbing horror of this reality is not skirted. But its extraordinary power owes much to the depiction of Hoffmann.

He writes poetry, he kills, he listens to Beethoven, he attempts to rape. He is a beast. But he is a human being.