THE Kindly Ones are the Furies of Greek mythology who visited terrible vengeance on those guilty of heinous crimes. They pursued Orestes, son of Clytemnestra, for killing his mother and her paramour after the adulterous pair slaughtered his father, Agamemnon. Yet, as in Aeschylus's famous version of the legend in Oresteia, their wrath was deflected. Orestes was forgiven because he had killed in a just cause and the Furies were converted into the Kindly Ones, the custodians of justice and the natural order. The relevance of this myth is spelled out in the last sentence of this brutal, sickening but impressive first novel, a dark tale of Hitler's Reich and its enthusiastic champions.

Jonathan Littell was born in New York in 1967. His father, Robert Littell, the son of Polish immigrants, worked as a journalist and wrote numerous espionage novels, mostly concerned with the CIA and the KGB. The younger Littell was educated in France and America. Thanks to the scandalous success of this novel - published in Paris in 2006 as Les Bienveillantes, it won both the Prix Goncourt and the fiction prize of the French Academy - Littell was honoured by having French citizenship conferred on him in 2007, even though he lives in Spain.

The novel charts the career of Max Aue, a half-French, half-German SS officer, a jurist and a bureaucrat, and keen observer and occasional participant in the horrors of World War II: the massacre of Jews in the forests of Ukraine, the disaster of Stalingrad, the death camps of Poland, particularly Auschwitz, and the collapse of Hitler's dream in the rubble of Berlin.

It begins with a provocation. A lace manufacturer in postwar Europe, Aue looks back on his past without regret. Whereas others have reinvented themselves, Aue is still convinced by the truth of a Nazi propagandist's insistence that "the Jewish question is no question of humanity, and it is no question of religion; it is solely a question of political hygiene".

The imperatives of political hygiene demanded, therefore, that Europe be cleansed of all blemishes: simpletons, the mentally ill, the deformed, homosexuals and, above all, the subhuman race of Jews. Aue's reminiscences make up a compendium of Nazi racial, social and historical lore. The decision to exterminate European Jewry was based on impeccable scientific grounds, he believes.

From the outset, it is true, he had misgivings about the methods employed and the motivation of some of the people involved in the grand project. He was appalled by the messy brutality of the killing fields of the Ukraine and the psychological impact of the executions on those whose duty it was to shoot, day after day after day, row upon row of Ukrainian and Russian Jews. Gassing was a far more civilised and efficient alternative.

He remains convinced, nevertheless, that sending trainloads of Jews to the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz was a serious mistake. Many, perhaps most (except, of course, children and the elderly) could have been exploited to boost Germany's swiftly contracting workforce. In other words, the Final Solution should have been postponed.

All this (and much more besides) makes it clear that Littell set out to provoke. The provocation is not only ideological but literary as well. The seemingly endless paragraphs of his bureaucratic prose - crammed with acronyms and military-political jargon - are filled with minutely described acts of barbarism. The slithering piles of bodies in the pits of the Ukraine, blood and gore forming broad rivulets, spill over many pages of the novel.

Elsewhere, public hangings (in Kiev and then in Berlin in 1945) - festering corpses hanging from lampposts and balconies - are evoked in ways that have no truck with understatement or squeamishness. The horrors of the siege of Stalingrad are conveyed just as vividly, with nauseating precision.

By contrast, Littell employs a more oblique means of capturing the essence of what went on at Auschwitz: a line of ants marching relentlessly from the ovens to the commandant's well-maintained house and garden. But that memorable vignette arrives some 800 pages into the novel - even Littell might have felt by then that enough was enough.

The publication of the novel in 2006 and the prestigious prizes conferred on its author met the predictable response. Littell was vilified in some quarters as an apologist for the Holocaust. He did not help matters by questioning the accuracy of the term, dissociating himself from his Jewish background and bucketing Israel for its brutal treatment of Palestinians. Sensibly no doubt, he now refuses to give interviews. Yet, in one sense, it is too late: The Kindly Ones cannot shake off its reputation as anti-Semitic propaganda, a jumbo-sized The Hand That Signed The Paper.

The reality is more complex. The Kindly Ones lacks subtlety; its prose (with one or two significant exceptions) is no more than workmanlike. Littell's favourite tool seems to be a sledgehammer. Yet, for all that, the novel is deeply and disturbingly ambiguous. Aue's painstakingly detailed recollections chart his moral and psychological disintegration, how an innate though suppressed moral sense finally triumphs, exacting its revenge.

The novel's title, with its glance towards ancient mythology confirmed by its concluding words ("The Kindly Ones were on to me" in Charlotte Mandell's somewhat less-than-felicitous English formulation), holds the clue. As much as a history of the Third Reich, The Kindly Ones is the story of Max Aue's journey to a dark and paradoxical self-knowledge.

His father was German, abandoning his family (ostensibly to fight Bolsheviks in the years between the two wars) when Aue and his twin sister, Una, were young children. Aue idolised his father and detested his French-born mother, especially after she had her husband declared dead and married a Frenchman. During their early adolescence, the brother and sister engaged in a brief and shadowy sexual experiment. They were separated, packed off to boarding school. After that Aue seemed to have been incapable of having sex with women, preferring young men with whom he engaged in erotic though not explicitly sexual practices.

One day, on a whim, he decided to visit his mother. The next morning he woke up to find himself covered in blood, his mother and stepfather murdered, the two mysterious young boys they were sheltering nowhere to be seen. Who was the murderer; what had happened to those boys? In the last months of the war, as he is holed up in his sister's isolated manor house, engaging in violent autoerotic and scatological fantasies, Aue comes to a partial understanding of what happened in his stepfather's house, of his own and his sister's story and that of his world, too. After that he declines rapidly into murderous brutality as Hitler's Reich achieves its fiery end.

All this, I realise, sounds corny - and some parts of the novel are, indeed, clumsily melodramatic. Yet Littell's obsessive exploration of the darkest corners of Aue's soul carries considerable though unsettling conviction. It is much enhanced by the gradual realisation that here is a version of the ancient tale of Orestes's perhaps misplaced love for his father, his furious hatred of his mother and his troubling relationship with his sister, Electra.

The novel's title is but one of several ambiguities that enhance this strange work: Aue and many of his companions saw themselves as the guardians of German culture and racial purity, visiting retribution on those who would pollute it. The titles given to the novel's sections or chapters (Toccata, Courante, Saraband and so on) gesture in elusive ways towards the graceful, civilised and elegant instrumental music of the 18th century, which Aue admires so greatly and paradoxically, of course. The most striking paradox of all, however, is mentioned twice only, and then fleetingly: Aue, the proud SS officer, a flower of the Aryan race, had been circumcised.

Andrew Riemer is the Herald's chief book reviewer.