Is it ever justified to wish evil on someone? I'm afraid, whatever the wisdom of it, I have to confess that my Easter made me an evangelist for evil. In particular it made me anxious to draw every friend I have into an addictive relationship with moral squalor. One I've just come out of.

For almost the entire Easter break I spent every spare minute I had in communion with depravity. It might not have looked like it to anyone passing by. They would have seen me in the passenger seat of our Skoda, hunched over a volume they might have presumed was a road atlas, oblivious to screaming children and exasperated wife, presumably desperately trying to work out where the turning for Llanystumdwy was before total infant meltdown occurred.

Except I wasn't. What was absorbing my attention, even as my children were trying to distract me with cries of pain pitched at the sort of volume even an Iron Maiden roadie would find impossible to take, was not the twists and turns of the A470 but a novel. Translated from the French. More than 970 pages long. With a hero who is an incestuous and matricidal conviction Nazi.

The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, is not the sort of book you really want to confess to liking. Saying you found such a work compelling, absorbing, impossible to be separated from, is a bit like confessing that your favourite holiday destination is the Congo or keeping a rook as a pet - it puts you on the creepy side of odd.

And if the brief summary I've given of Littell's book makes it sound less than ideal for naming as your Desert Island Discs favourite, the reality of the narrative is, if anything, far more explicitly horrific than you can imagine.

There are accounts of the activities of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern front, dispatching Jewish prisoners by the hundred, which in their intimacy and detail make you recoil in your seat as you read, and provoke tears. But still I read on.

Because although Littell is unsparing in his account of unforgiveable crimes, and shocking also in the way he deals with sexual matters, his novel provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil. In that sense, I suppose, when I was absorbed in this book in the car, I was reading a road map. To Hell.

Littell anatomises Nazi society and ideology in such a way as to make us understand how men who might have been good neighbours and admired friends in other times became agents of mass murder. He explains how individuals who were ostensibly civilised and obviously intelligent could be bewitched by an ideology that promised to erase the pain of past humiliation and offered not personal glory but an opportunity to serve a goal higher than themselves. In the course of which they became pitiless killers.

The relevance of Littell's insights to our age, when another generation of young men are being seduced by the dark glamour of totalitarian terror, is clear. But Littell's work is much much more than a study in ideological extremism.

Like Dostoevsky he charts the darker recesses of the human soul in such depth that he makes us realise how precious are the codes, rituals and taboos of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.

Again, like Dostoevsky, Littell deploys his characters to make arguments, to illuminate philosophical positions, in a way that both helps to enrich the narrative and stimulate thought like few other novels I've ever read. Littell's protagonist engages in a series of discussions that punctuate the text, each of which are beautifully constructed dramatic set pieces. As well as brilliantly revealing essays in political thought.

One dialectical duel, with a Red Army commissar in Stalingrad, is a breathtaking exercise in fidelity to history that allows you to fully inhabit the mind of two passionate advocates of the 20th century's most revolutionary, and destructive, ideologies.

Reading The Kindly Ones is exhausting - draining not just because of the length, and the pitiless accumulation of detail about the inner workings of the Nazi regime, but also because the enormities it describes tax our powers of sympathy to the very limit.

But while it is exhausting it is also rewarding, as almost no other new novel I can remember reading for years, has been. The Kindly Ones confronts the reader with a multitude of arguments - including the cases made for the worst crimes humanity has ever committed - but the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction.

Judge this book by its cover

Which is more than can be said for Born Under a Million Shadows by Andrea Busfield. A romantic novel set in Afghanistan, just published this month and intended to follow where The Kite Runner led, it is, above all, an argument for rationing paper.

But while BUMS (to give the novel its proper acronym) is not worth dwelling another moment on, it does illuminate a trend of our times. Any book with a cover clearly designed to evoke the cover of an existing bestseller is an automatic stinker.

Like many nostalgics I miss the austerity chic of the old orange Penguins with their utter absence of any cover decoration save the name of the author and the title in sans serif print. But one benefit of the marketing requirement for more vivid cover designs to illustrate the titles on the 3 for 2 table is that you can know with certainty that 2 out of the 3 novels with a barefoot boy on the front aren't worth a farthing.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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