The Emperor of Lies

If you're going to write a big, ambitious novel about human infamy, you could do worse than to start with Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi-approved leader of the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto. One of history's more charmless figures, Rumkowski is mainly remembered as a collaborationist who, when asked to hand over to the Nazi authorities 100,000 of the ghetto's children, elderly and sick for 'resettlement', obediently did so - although not before having sexually abused more than a few of the children.

Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg, however, isn't interested in making a two-dimensional portrait of a bogeyman. Rumkowski was a Jew, and his fate in the end was no different from everyone else's. Odiously narcissistic and delusional he may have been, but it seems that his aim was, in a twisted way, to save the Lodz Jews by making them indispensible to the Nazi war machine: good, if unequal, citizens, living in a model industrial Bantustan. He may genuinely have believed, moreover, that in handing over the Ghetto's weakest citizens he was ensuring the survival of those remaining. He was, of course, disastrously wrong, and not in any forgivable way: but his story is a fascinating and upsetting one which asks serious questions about the limits of human action in a moral void.

Sem-Sandberg's prose, his sense of collage and texture, and his sheer narrative heft make for a book ofr astonishing emotional power which far outstrips, in execution and in seriousness, most of what tends to be referred to as, for want of a less hair-raising term, 'holocaust fiction'. The result has been described as the best Swedish novel of the past thirty years: unsparing in the attention it pays to unimaginable suffering, weirdly beautiful in execution, and intellectually courageous in its willingness to delve into the moral grey areas of a story that, traditionally, we're much more used to being told in black and white.