By: Martin Amis Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 176 Publication Date: September 29, 1992 Release Date: September 29, 1992
Product Description: "A novel that seems to have been written with the term 'tour de force' in mind . . . Amis's radical rethinking of time . . . brings the abomination of the Holocaust home to the jaded late-20th-century reader in a way that few conventional novels could." Village Voice Literary Supplement. "Splendid . . . bold . . . gripping from start to finish."--Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Amazon.com Review: Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that's fundamentally unspeakable? Amis' solution is a deft literary conceit of narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the person of one man, ex-Nazi doctor Tod T. Friendly. One identity wakes at the moment of Friendly's death and runs backwards in time, like a movie played in reverse, (e.g., factory smokestacks scrub the air clean,) unaware of the terrible past he approaches. The "normal" consciousness runs in time's regular direction, fleeing his ignominious history.
"At such times, I conclude, the soul can only hang in the dark, like a white bat, and let the darkness have the day." philosophizes the doppelganger-narrator of this marvelous book that resides within the body of an elderly, paralyzed man, (p 10) "Flanked by the great guitars of the ears, his hair lay thin over the orange-peel scalp, in white worms." Not a fan of those who try to help him, (p 4) "How I hate doctors...They are life's gatekeepers. And why would anyone want to be that?" he feels something sinister, (p 5) "the sense of starting out on a terrible journey, toward a terrible secret," and peculiar, as the dates seem to run in reverse, (p 8) "It just seems to me that the film is running backward," and, (p 7) "I have no access to his thoughts-but I am awash with his emotions." Yet, he has his own views on the world, (p 16) "The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth's exiled or demoted soul," his inhabitee, (p 54) "Tod is a big depositor in the bank where fear is kept," (p 91) "John Young...daily straddles a storm of souls, which kick up in the wind like leaves..." and mankind, (p 40) "Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal."
What he doesn't realize (and what makes the novel so great) is that what he is observing is his host's life run backwards. To say more would spoil an absolutely original book. Also great: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
A Remarkable Achievement You hear what he's done -- written a novel in which time moves backwards -- and you think it's a clever gimmick. Then you read the book and are simply blown away at how insightful and genuine it is. You race through what he surely did not. This is why we read.
''He is traveling towards his secret" "London Fields," Amis' previous novel, he tells us in its forward, could have been called "Time's Arrow," and that term comes up a couple of times in that sprawling narrative epic of environmental and personal chaos near the millennium. His experimental style in that novel (also reviewed by me) took on a mock-heroic, satirical tone that tried to fit its bitter social critiques and mordant humor. For "Time's Arrow," wisely, Amis stays sober. The voice assumed sounds much more American than the earlier novel, and this matter-of-fact style, reminding me in parts of Philip Roth's "Everyman," makes the mix of the bizarre and the mundane convincing. The daring of this novel may undo it from reaching perfection, but it remains worthwhile as an intellectual and spiritual quest into how a human contorts under pressures to do the wrong thing.
Reading it, I feared continuing as the horrors loomed ahead-- or behind. The ingenious structure of the tale fascinates. You fear how Dr. Friendly's medical skills will be warped, and how his care for children in his elderly incognito existence in America will be demonstrated to have emerged from the Nazi camps. This becomes a truly cathartic novel, in which fear and pity mingle as you turn the pages forward, backward into the origins of the doctor's past crimes.
An early passage: "A child's breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of a father's hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife's blade: anything like that made me flinch and veer. But the body I live and move in, Tod's body, feels nothing." (28) So we learn as his soul tells his tale. Like his spirit, we may not wish to continue the journey as the future recedes and the memories left repressed rear up and assault our senses, but this sometimes stunning depiction of the last century's historical regression into savagery, in its often relentless momentum, pulls us into their maelstrom.
The strain of this structure, perhaps, means that the underlying moral condition, buried as it is under the weight of time and of apparent suppression by the doctor, becomes less distinct. This may be intentional, but it blunts the impact of the novel. Perhaps, on the other hand, this has been an effective step back by Amis, for how many fictional works have tried and also stumbled in trying to "explain" the camps, the doctors, and the evil?
Amis, with relative reticence, and restraint, manages to take us into the labs of Auschwitz without exploitation or bathos. Parts remained rather unclear, but in retrospect I sense this shows the soul, and then Amis, stepping back from fully confronting the terrors that are summoned back from the lands of the dead. The necessary details that evoke this terrestrial hell, both in Tod's later life and his earlier years, have been integrated subtly, to show off by the estrangement of the form their parallel distortion in content, compared with conventional fiction and moral standards. This feat, in a novel that by its daring may (like "London Fields" in its range and hubris) show that Amis, even when he writes a less than perfect tale, can earn acclaim for his imagination, his innovation, and his performance in a bravura turn that compels you.
Surprising Change in Narrative Pattern I realize that other authors have broken with the linear narrative pattern, but I have to say that the way Amis broke down the life of his protagonist here, by telling his life backwards, was amazing. I doubt that many writers could figure out a way to still insert some sort of social commentary, and yet Amis manages to do just that. I loved the way he snatches us right up in the beginning with the character's death, and we then spend the rest of the novel trying to piece together how or why he died, what he did in his life, and how these experiences shaped the character we saw in the beginning/end. It's an interesting read, and one that I'd recommend doing in one sitting if possible!
Directions The main conceit of this novel is that time is moving backward. We learn, through dialogue which is chronologically backward who and what the main character is, the nature of his crimes, and the realization of what kind of character we are dealing with. In less deft hands than Amis', this premise could quickly become confusing or a bore. But Amis writes sentences of great declarative value, and is an extraordinary craftsman with words. So this POMO exercise in a non-traditional narrative never feels contrived or unnatural. It does not have a forced quality but seems a natural outgrowth of Amis' world of words.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
