The story is conveyed by three narrators: Angelus Thomsen, the officer; Paul Doll, the commandant; and Szmul Zacharias, a Jewish Sonderkommando.

While spying on Hannah in the bathroom (as he does regularly), Paul watches her read the letter from Thomsen secretly and rather excitedly, before destroying it.

From that point onward, his wife becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, viciously taunting him in private and embarrassing him in public.

He is told what happened at Walpurgisnacht: at the moment Szmul was to murder Hannah, he instead pointed the weapon on himself and revealed the truth to her.

The epilogue, named Aftermath, is also divided into three sections, all of them narrated by Thomsen, and each devoted to a different woman: first Esther, then Gerda Bormann, and finally Hannah Doll.

He is zealously devoted to the Nazi effort of genocide, and shows a terrifying apathy to the horrors of the concentration camp.

As the German defeat becomes imminent and affects the morale of everyone around him, Doll makes an absurdly detached evaluation of the war's aftermath.

[1][2] Joyce Carol Oates, writing for The New Yorker, described the novel as "a compendium of epiphanies, appalled asides, anecdotes, and radically condensed history", with Amis "at his most compelling as a satiric vivisectionist with a cool eye and an unwavering scalpel".