This novel took France by storm. Its publication in 2006 was greeted with rave reviews that compared its author (an American who spent most of his early years in France and writes in French) to Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt and the Académie Française's Grand Prix du Roman. Its sales in Europe exceed 1m copies.

Now made available to English readers in a translation by Charlotte Mandell, The Kindly Ones will surely cause jaws here to drop with a different kind of amazement. For Jonathan Littell's 984-page book is so bloatedly inept that its reverential reception across the Channel seems barely comprehensible.

Despite its length, the novel is rudimentary in setup. Calling for attention with his portentous opening line (“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened”), its narrator Max Aue, a Nazi war criminal who has escaped retribution by creating a new existence for himself as a respectable-seeming family man and factory manager in northern France, recounts with pitiless prolixity his experiences as an SS officer: in the Ukraine, at Stalingrad, in occupied France, Auschwitz, bomb-battered Berlin and the Führer's bunker.

The first of the book's numerous improbabilities is Aue's prodigious capacity to recall in profuse, minute detail all that was done and said (often in voluminously voluble speeches) more than 50 years earlier. Inability to forget isn't his only elephantine characteristic. Thumping ponderousness resounds through his mammoth monologue. Large tracts of it are little more than mounds of mugged-up fact: itemisings of military rankings in the SS or the Wehrmacht, of Nazi organisational structures, technical terminology and acronyms (“We receive our orders from the RSHA, via the Gruppenstab, and from the HSSPF. Is that clear?”). Littell doesn't lay on his research with a trowel: he uses a fleet of dumper trucks. Slurries of data are tipped across his storyline as it meanders through seemingly interminable paragraphs. Typically, a remark about the Caucasus, where Aue is convalescing - “This is not the place to expand on the peculiarities of this fascinating region” - is followed by a six-page dissertation on its idiosyncratic dialects (“it's mainly a question, together with Abaza, Adyghe, and Kabardo-Cherkess, along with Ubykh which is almost extinct and can still be found only among a few speakers in Anatolia, of a single language with strong dialectical variants. The same goes for Vainakh, which has several forms, of which the main ones are Chechen and Ingush. On the other hand, in Dagestan, it's still very confusing . . .” etc etc).

Littell's reams of documentation seem designed to back his perception that the Third Reich grotesquely combined barbarity and bureaucracy. Another familiar view - that culture and carnage could bizarrely coexist within it - also gets heavy emphasis. Brimming with atrocities, slaughter, torture and sadism, Aue's narrative is divided into sections named after movements (Sarabande, Menuet, Gigue) from suites by Bach, whose works, along with those of other classical composers - Rameau, Mozart, Chopin, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms - repeatedly counterpoint horrors in the novel.

The cultural overlay that Littell most insistently imposes on his book's welter of abominations is Greek tragedy. His novel takes its title from a name for the Furies. And Aue, you're left in no doubt, is a latter-day version of a famous fugitive from those avenging spirits, Agamemnon's son, Orestes, who murdered his mother and her lover. Seen perusing Sartre's essay about Orestes and performing in Sophocles's play about his sister, Electra, Aue often replicates the young man's behaviour. After he visits them in Antibes, his hated mother and her second husband are found strangled and axed to death. Like Orestes he is passionately attached to his sister. Indeed, true to the novel's penchant for overkill, he soon reveals that he had a rawly intense incestuous relationship with her when they were young.

Her refusal to continue this into adult life has, we're given to understand, turned him into a homosexual with a craving to be manhandled by rough trade (one physiologically baffling scene has him “plunging into the luxuriant forest” of a pick-up's genitals). Still harbouring embittered yearnings for his sister, he breaks into her country house and, in a sequence remarkable even by this novel's frequently feculent standards, defiles it by soiling every available surface.

Incontinence is a big problem for Aue, whose virtually incessant bouts of diarrhoea and lengthy nightmares about unstaunchable bowel motions are chronicled copiously (the one literary award this novel could credibly receive, you feel, would be for Most Loose-Sphinctered Fictional Narrator). All of this leaves Littell with a problem on his hands in trying to convince you that Aue is a kind of Everyman (“I tell you I am just like you!”) unluckily born into the wrong historical circumstances.

Real-life monsters - Eichmann, Mengele, Himmler, Hitler - cross Aue's path. But, in accord with Littell's taste for the outlandishly overblown, the novel's most malign presence is an imaginary evil genius, Dr Mandelbrod. Hugely obese, “like an Oriental idol”, he is wheeled around on a throne-like chair, stroking a cat with his pudgy finger, emitting a fetid odour and tended by a bevy of lookalike blonde “amazons” (Hilde, Helga, Heide and Hedwig) fetchingly got-up in fetishistic rig-outs such as male riding breeches. A melodramatic figment that James Bond might have encountered, this creepy cliché, accompanied by a villainous sidekick with a glass eye, epitomises the lurid unreality that leaves this Third Reich novel, for all its plethora of detail, carrying as much conviction as a plastic Iron Cross.

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell
trans Charlotte Mandell
Chatto £20 pp984

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