Time's Arrow (novel)

infobox Book |
name = Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence
orig title =
translator =


author = Martin Amis
cover_artist =
country = England
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = Jonathan Cape
release_date = 1991
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 165 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-679-73572-0
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence" (1991) is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1991).

Plot summary

The book recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in a disorienting reverse chronology. The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse, as the main character becomes younger and younger during the course of the novel. The narrator is not exactly the protagonist himself but a secondary consciousness apparently living within him, feeling his feelings but with no access to his thoughts and no control over events. Some passages may be interpreted as hinting that this narrator may in some way be the conscience, but this is not clear. The narrator may alternatively be considered merely a necessary device to narrate a reverse story.

Amis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation. Amis' use of these techniques is aimed to create an unsettling and irrational aura for the reader; indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the novel is the narrator's persistent misinterpretation of events. For example, he simply accepts that people wait for an hour in a physician's waiting room after being examined, although at some points he has doubts about this tradition. Relationships are portrayed with stormy beginnings that slowly fade into pleasant romances. Although the narrator accepts all this, he is puzzled and feels that the world does not really make sense.

The reverse narrative begins in America, where the doctor is first living in retirement and then practising medicine. He is always fearful of something and does not want to be too conspicuous. Later he changes his identity and moves to New York. (Considering the story forward, he escaped Europe after the war and succeeded in settling in America, with the assistance of a Reverend Nicholas Kreditor who apparently assists war criminals in hiding.) In 1948 he travels (in reverse) to Portugal, from where he makes his way to Auschwitz.

The doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, assists "Uncle Pepi" (modelled on Josef Mengele) in his torture and murder of Jews. While at Auschwitz, the reverse chronology means that he returns the dead to life and heals the sick, rather than the opposite. The broader image presented is that all those that died in the Holocaust are revived and returned to their homes.

What tells me that this is right? What tells me that all the rest was wrong? Certainly not my aesthetic sense. I would never claim that Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz was good to look at. Or to listen to, or to smell, or to taste, or to touch. There was, among my colleagues there, a general though desultory quest for greater elegance. I can understand that word, and all its yearning: "elegant". Not for its elegance did I come to love the evening sky above the Vistula, hellish red with the gathering souls. Creation is easy. Also ugly. "Hier ist kein warum". Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where. Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race. To make a people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas, with electricity, with shit, with fire.

"(p119-120, Vantage edition, 1992)"

In the reversed version of reality, not only is simple chronology reversed (people become younger, and eventually become children, then babies, and then re-enter their mothers' wombs, where they finally cease to exist) but so is morality. Blows heal injuries, doctors cause them. Theft becomes donation, and vice versa. In a passage about prostitutes, doctors harm them while pimps give them money and heal them. When the protagonist reaches Auschwitz, however, the world starts to make sense. A whole new race is created.

In reality, of course, the world goes forward, meaning that this view of Auschwitz must be again reversed by the reader. The story can thus be seen as a way of showing how the Holocaust is not merely an evil act but a complete reversal of humanity and even ordinary logic.

Trivia

As Amis noted in an Author's Note at the beginning of his earlier novel "London Fields", he originally considered "Time's Arrow" as a title for that book. Among the influences Amis acknowledges are a 'famous paragraph' from Kurt Vonnegut, presumably the section of "Slaughterhouse 5" in which the protagonist watches a film of World War II bombings in reverse. He also credits Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

External links

* [http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Amis1.html Essay]
* [http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/amis-times_arrow.htm Review]