Time's Arrow

Martin Amis did something really different with Time’s Arrow. The narrator lives his life backwards… no, that’s not right. He watches his life backwards. His consciousness is born as an old man, and is irrevocably attached to a man who is called (at this point anyway) Dr. Tod Friendly.

At first, the book is simply an entertaining, vivid and clever look at life backwards. We hear about the pain of going to the toilet in the morning (oh, just think about it), emptying food onto empty plates, letters than appear in the fireplace and fling themselves into your hand, starting relationships with a slap on the face and most disturbingly, the eventual descriptions of Friendly’s job. Imagine patients who walk in happily looking healthy and rested. Then Friendly and his colleagues go to work on them, unplucking stitches, implanting bits of broken glass, sewing back on ruined limbs. The narrator (well, you cannot really call him Friendly) is sickened by his work. He is also plagued by nightmares that he assumes comes from his sickening job.

Life goes on, and the novel could simply be an interesting study of life lived backwards, but Amis eventually takes us to Nazi Germany and the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Perversely, our narrator thinks he has come to the most wonderful place; they make human beings in ovens! Oh what great work, bringing to life so many pale corpses! Sewing together his beloved Jews from nothing but a bucket of body parts! They look so skinny and sick at the beginning, and grow fatter and more rosy cheeked until they are sent off on trains into the world. Later (earlier?) he also re-lives going and fixing the broken houses of his beloved Jews, and giving them money from his own pocket. We meet his wife and then they get married. Then he goes right back into his childhood, until he cannot even remember who and what he is.

This is a fascinating read, and certainly makes you think about the world around you going backwards. But what was missing for me was a sense of purpose. Why did he have to experience his life this way? A punishment for his sins? But Amis doesn’t go here. It’s just the story of an extraordinary life told backwards.