The character of time is an open question in physics and philosophy. Entropy and the laws of thermodynamics seem to indicate that there is an "arrow of time," that time goes only in one "direction." Despite our best efforts, however, we still just don't know. It is, however, a well-known fact that humans, or at least most of us, experience time in an aggressively linear fashion. Whatever the objective nature of time, for humanity time moves in one direction common to everyone. There's no going back, and there is no reliving the past.In Time's Arrow, Martin Amis creates a consciousness that experiences the life of Tod T. Friendly in reverse. Time literally flows backward, but at the same pace as we experience it in our lives, so this consciousness watches Tod grow younger. Although equipped with "general knowledge" this consciousness has no sense of what "normal" life is like—it is, for all intents and purposes, tabula rasa. The process of eating involves regurgitating food onto a plate and sculpting it into a meal (presumably one would then uncook the food, bag it, and return it to a supermarket). Similarly, the toilet becomes the source of sustenance—yeah, I'm not going to explain that any further.So through the eyes of this hitchhiker, Amis shows us how funny our lives would be if experienced in reverse. Relationships start with break ups and end with shy meet-cutes. Babies are implanted into a mother's womb, in which they shrink for nine months and then are "killed" by a father's sexual act. And Tod Friendly is a doctor, a profession feared by the public because its practitioners are responsible for inflicting injuries on healthy people and sending them back out on the streets, where car accidents, rapists, etc., will heal them.The punchline of this novel-length joke is, of course, not a spoiler, because it's on the dust jacket: Tod Friendly is an ex-Nazi doctor from Auschwitz. For those of us who experience time "forward," he is a monster complicit in the Holocaust; for Amis' hitchhiker, he is a Frankenstein-like hero, a scientist who pieces together Jews from the grave or materializes them from the gas chamber and restores them to life, sometimes hundreds or thousands a day! Auschwitz is a miracle centre. It's a twisted premise, and that should make it promising.Except Time's Arrow fails at conveying any meaning. I can't see the point Amis is trying to make through this chronological reversal. It can't just be that life looks silly in rewind. Stumped in a way I seldom am, let us examine the dust jacket of my edition for some clues:This spectral observer's ignorance of the doctor's past combines with the reader's awful knowledge to reverse the numbing effects of time and gives history the impact of direct experience.Oh, OK, now I get it. This is all about dramatic irony. Amis is trying to juxtapose the moral innocence of his narrator with our knowledge of what Tod is going to do in his past (the narrator's future). And that is pretty much the only source of entertainment in this entire book.How exactly does this "reverse the numbing effects of time" though? Now my dust jacket is equivocating! Obviously one doesn't have to tell a story in reverse to make a reader empathize with events from the past. And for reasons I'll explore later, I am actually convinced of the opposite of this claim: Amis' choice in narrative style ruins the hope for empathy or enjoyment.And "gives history the impact of direct experience?" I don't want to fault Amis for this, since he did not hire the person who wrote the jacket copy. But in the paraphrased words of Inigo Montoya, I do no think that phrase means what you think it means, gentle dust jacket writer. At least not in a literal sense. Obviously it's meant to be a metaphor, but in that function it has the same flaw as the previous phrase: exactly how does this differentiate Time's Arrow from any other work of historical fiction? It doesn't.The jacket goes on to claim that "Time's Arrow is a stunning, virtuosic [sic:] exploration of guilt and repression, America and Germany, history, time, and morality." Now I'm starting to wonder if the dust jacket writer read the same book as me. Who is supposed to feel guilt? Tod Friendly? I took the liberty of reading the conversations between Tod and others in reverse (so that they would make sense in my perspective) and even that did not shed more light on his character. I can't tell if he feels guilty for what happened in Auschwitz (I get the sense that he doesn't, but maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention). Or is the narrator supposed to feel guilty for Tod's actions? I doubt that somehow, because after watching Tod "give life" to Jews, the narrator thinks this guy is the bee's knees (or whatever the German equivalent of that expression is).All right, so I've digressed somewhat. I've started bashing the book jacket instead of the book, and I should reiterate that Amis had little if any control over what the dust jacket promises the reader. I have read many books which are, in retrospect, nothing like their jacket copy promises but were still good judged on their own merits. So I'll put aside the discussion of the themes of Time's Arrow, confusing as they are. Where does this book stand as, you know, a book?Here I can praise Time's Arrow in one respect: it is a paradigm case of a "literary experiment." Amis had an interesting idea and ran with it. I can grok that. But an interesting idea does not a novel make, and in this case, I think the idea actually works counter to the experience of reading a novel. There is nothing wrong with chronological reversal itself, but the way in which Amis has chosen to use it cripples the story.Simply put, Amis' narrator is a spectator. It cannot interact with the world in any way other than through Tod's experiences, which it cannot affect. This consciousness, whatever it may be, is locked in Tod's body with no volition of its own, able only to think and feel for itself. What a miserable existence!This poses a problem for the reader too. Not only is the narrator unable to change events, but the characters are similarly impotent. Amis' chronological reversal has removed the ability for any character to make a choice or change in any way. Time's Arrow is essentially MST3K where you are stuck watching Tod's life in reverse with a smart-ass companion who doesn't know about World War II. The story is narrative and only narrative.The genius of fiction is its ability to create cognitive dissonance within a reader. At an intellectual level, the reader knows that a non-interactive plot will always have the same outcome, no matter how many times one reads it. Unlike Schrödinger's cat, that outcome will also remain the same whether or not one reads the book. Nevertheless, during the actual experience of reading, every aspect of the story is bent toward convincing the reader that the characters make choices which affect the plot. We don't want to believe that Juliet kills herself because Shakespeare willed it so; we believe that she kills herself out of grief for the loss of Romeo.The style in which Amis' employs his narrative conceit collapses this cognitive dissonance. The narrator certainly never has a crisis of any kind. In fact, it is extremely mellow considering it has experienced sixty years without any ability to affect the external world. That would drive me crazy. And Tod's life does not interest me, because when played in reverse, Tod just becomes a robot. Any significance of his role in the Holocaust is lost. Sure, it's ironic because we know it is coming and the narrator does not. However, unlike a conventional work of historical fiction, we never have access to Tod's feelings and motivations for becoming a Nazi doctor; we never see his fall and his redemption (or lack thereof). We see it twisted and in reverse, but that is not the same thing.So kudos to Martin Amis for this literary experiment. After all, by definition, if it is an experiment its outcome is uncertain. So does Time's Arrow succeed or fail as a literary experiment? I don't want to be harsh, but the answer is failure. By no stretch of the word did I hate this book, but it was a disappointment. And as a story, backwards or forwards, it's no good at all.
The premise of this book is well-recorded in earlier reviews: We start with the death of a doctor named Tod Friendly, and then move backwards through his life (much life hitting the Rewind button on a VCR while the tape was still playing). In reverse, the doctors take healthy patients and leave them sick and injured, while love affairs begin with arguments and end with shy flirtation. The key here is the defining period of Tod's life, towards which we are carried, our suspicions growing along the way. To me, though, the strongest parts are the minor details. For instance, Tod appreciates the game of chess, the point of which seems to be to take widely scattered figures and gradually arrange them all in neat rows, and to do so no faster or slower than the person sitting across from you. The constant rewind does create a sort of seasickness at times, most notably in the (mercifully few) pieces of dialogue, which force the reader to rearrange how the lines follow each other as you read. In less capable hands, this could have been a pointless grad school writing exercise, but Amis manages to give it a point, and an air of literary credibility.
—George
I can't say enough about this novel, though a quick glance at my friends' reviews reveals that they liked it but were not quite as blown away by it. I loved how Amis took a conceit (running the world backwards and witnessing it from a naive viewpoint that must make sense of backwards-living) and used it to make new something that had grown shopworn and overfamiliar: Literature about the Holocaust. The novel is howlingly funny, and just when you want it to gain in seriousness and gravity, it does--the book deepens and becomes about the human condition, and about the nature of the soul and sin. In fact, between the galleys of the book and the final printing, Amis removed two words from the final line: "And I, [the soul] within, who came along too late or too early to make a difference." (I am writing this from memory, so if it is a misquote, my apologies. The book is in a box somewhere.) An awesome novel, in the truest sense of "awesome."
—Michael
She can't help it if her best isn't very good, but she's done it. She's ploddingly typed out her half-assedly apropos review, then clicked on the stars -- three of them, yellow and cartoony, her blithe summation of an author's painstakingly wrought offering to twentieth-century literature. He'll probably spend years writing then researching this thing, which she's already rated like it's an eBay-seller transaction, and reviewed with all the thoughtfulness and care of an Adderall-snorting thirteen-year-old's Facebook status update...In any case, now she'll see what this book's all about. She picks it up, name-scans the Afterword (Aw, Hitch!), and begins. Seems to be a fairly standard-sort bildungsroman kind of thing, young boy into man... oh, no, but wait. It's not really -- some heavy stuff here -- and -- uh oh, what's this? -- an arguably silly postmodern TRICK! She likes it well enough, reads the whole thing through in about a day. This author does seem to have got a certain way with words, some nice little descriptive details: "Mickey Mouse sniggers and Greta Garbo averts her pained gaze from [a young couple's] mortified writhings on the shallow fur of cinema seats" (p. 154). Shallow fur! She likes that... Also some nice, darkly-brooding well-phrased stuff with its own intense, seductive style: "There's probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I'm tired of being human, if human is what I am. I'm tired of being human" (p. 93). Ooh, that's nice!More good stuff -- time passes from one era to the next with description that transcends mere gimmick... because gimmick is what this is, she sees, as she nears the first page. In this book, she discovers, time runs in reverse, and the life of the main character is being chronicled from the end backwards by a rather hapless, baffled narrator whom we're encouraged to picture as "a sentimentalized fetus, with faithful smile" (p. 42).Does it work? It works. She more or less does get pretty into the whole thing. But then, she's prone to jokes that go on way too long, and tends to find them more amusing in the endless retelling: an old man wearing bellbottoms in the early eighties is fashion's cutting edge, garbage men scatter trash throughout cities, while highway workers rip up the road. Of course, she knows, this is Literature, so sometimes the joke is very Serious: its protagonist is a doctor, who appalls his Jiminy Cricket-type observing ego by brutalizing patients, as doctors in this backwards world (almost) always necessarily do. The narrator speculates on the demolition of cities, centuries from now, into "the pleasant land -- green, promised," and pauses to assert that he's glad he wasn't around for the city's creation. It's poignant, while also cool, as she finds this novel has generally been throughout.By the time she's done, she's resolved to seek out more of the writer's work. Although this isn't the greatest book she's ever read, she enjoyed it, and she bets he's done better elsewhere with this evident cleverness and his linguistic gifts. She adds Time's Arrow to her to-read list, and reviews another book by Amis -- book reviews, The War Against Cliche -- which, when she reads it, she feels is vastly superior. Then she goes on to sample more of his fiction, and finds it sort of beguilingly uneven. As with Time's Arrow, each book has, to varying degrees, both its awe-inspiring strengths and unforgivable flaws. None of what she reads is, in her opinion, as good as his reviews... until she finally comes across London Fields, and is lovestruck: THIS is the Martin Amis novel she's been waiting for all her life!And why is the thing you're looking for always in the last place you look? It seems like she would read more Amis after loving London Fields so much, but she doesn't, and acts surprised later when a close female friend recommends his work. In fact, she seems to forget any real sense of who Amis is, and is overheard sharing a vague negative impression -- acquired who knows where -- that "only pretentious, asshole guys who are way too into coke and themselves read him."Which is too bad, because Martin Amis is a really good writer, and he's written a lot of books, and she might really enjoy some if she gave them a chance. But it's too late. Wait, is it too late? It might be too late, or, alternatively, it might not be... To be honest, she's not sure how this whole thing works, and trying to figure out the logistics sort of makes her head hurt.
—Jessica
