The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Chatto & Windus £20, 984 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Not many contemporary French novels find success in the English-speaking world, but this one comes with a pedigree. First published in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes, it won two of France’s most prestigious literary prizes and sold more than 700,000 copies. And that despite its length (nearly 1,000 pages), the grimness of its subject matter (the Holocaust) and the meagre reputation of its author, Jonathan Littell, an American former aid worker who grew up in France, lives in Spain and writes in French.

Some critics praised Les Bienveillantes for its refreshing ambition and realism, others dismissed it as sensationalist. But everybody was talking about it, and the English rights were reportedly sold for a six-figure sum.

Is it worth the fuss? That depends on your patience. The Kindly Ones, as it is now titled for English readers, is revolting, overlong and far from lucid. But it is also erudite, pitiless and mesmerising.

Its narrator, Maximilian Aue, is a half-French SS officer with a taste for boys, a distaste for killing and a creepy obsession with his twin sister Una. He recounts his wartime misdeeds without apology from northern France, where he has made a new life after escaping the Reich’s collapse.

Aue is present for many of the worst moments of the war, from the massacres in the Ukraine to the siege of Stalingrad, the industrialised horrors of Auschwitz and the fall of Berlin. He also has a bizarre encounter with the Führer in a sodden, stinking bunker. In all these events his role is peripheral: he spends much of the book making inspections, drafting reports and angling for a succession of ever-bigger jobs with Heydrich, Himmler, Eichmann and other celebrity war criminals.

Aue could be a poster boy for Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” school of Nazism, were it not for his lengthy moralising. “What man of sane mind could ever have imagined that they’d push jurists to assassinate people without a trial?” complains Aue, a trained lawyer who has been assigned to deal with “security threats” behind German lines in the East.

The problem is not that people lose sight of morality, he finds, but that they try to make the best choices they can among lesser evils, and then those evils add up. “There are psychopaths everywhere, all the time,” says Aue. “But the ordinary men that make up the State – especially in unstable times – now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you.”

Aue protests against the extermination of the Jews and gets physically ill at displays of brutality, which he describes in gruesome detail. He lobbies to improve the lot of camp inmates, and retreats into music and literature to salve his despair. He might merit your sympathy had Littell not made him so annoyingly pedantic.

There are two pages on Nazi euphemisms for killing, seven on the history of Caucasian linguistic forms, and more than 30 on Aue’s sexual fantasies involving his sister. Paragraphs and even sentences rattle on for pages. German acronyms and military ranks proliferate until you too know your Obersturmbannführer from your Hauptsturmführer.

Many of Littell’s best points about the war and the Holocaust have been made before. Cruelty is contagious and civilisation fragile. More specifically, the Germans could have learned from the British in handling conquered peoples; the Allied bombing campaign may itself have been a war crime; the Final Solution was a fatal diversion of war-fighting resources; and the Jews were persecuted because they reminded the Germans of themselves.

Himmler chillingly tells Aue that Jewish morality is a threat to the Nazi state, so Christians, as heritors of that code, must be the next to go. Aue concludes that the state, like the world of the Middle Ages, was built “on syllogisms that proved each other”. And only at the end does Littell clear up the matter of the book’s title: in Greek mythology “the kindly ones” is a euphemism for the Furies, who wrought vengeance against crimes of blood.

The marvel is that Littell packs so many furies into one book. He leaves no dead horse unbeaten, no atrocity undescribed, no depth of depravity unplumbed. Little wonder The Kindly Ones is so exasperating. Its scope is impossibly vast, its flaws inevitably visible. That may be why the novel caused such a stir in France, where contemporary fiction tends to be intimate, elegant, detached – and of limited interest to international audiences.

Now France, or at least an American who writes in French, has given the world a huge, untidy 19th-century roman fleuve of the sort Hugo, Balzac or Zola might have attempted. A book that tries to ask the big questions. And fails magnificently.

Donald Morrison teaches writing at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His new book, ‘The Death of French Culture’, is published later this year by Polity Press