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Time's Arrow (1992)

Time's Arrow (1992)

Book Info

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Genre
Rating
3.8 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0679735720 (ISBN13: 9780679735724)
Language
English
Publisher
vintage

About book Time's Arrow (1992)

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.

English Standard Version (©2001)For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.“What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember.”-Time’s Arrow This is what I want to remember: that I bought this off a wheeled cart for two quarters. That in a bad economy, this was a great investment. Amis is genius in this book. Pure genius. His structure starts with the last rattling gasp of life and then pulls the reader backward, reanimating a character’s troubled past by making it the future of the narrative. I knew going into this book that it was about the holocaust. What I did not know was that the holocaust could still move me, shock me, and brutalize me anymore. I had read too many books on it, seen too many movies and documentaries about it. I became stupid and calloused and let this lull me into thinking that the holocaust had been overdone. Overdone (!) as in boilerplate, as in Hollywood and botox. Thankfully, this book shamed me back into grief. Reading this book and trying to get a grasp on the main character is a little like trying to figure out what your face really looks like by only using the side of a spoon for a mirror. The narrator is hard to figure out; it may be the broken and detached voice of the main character’s conscience or it may not. Either way, the narrator is confused. Everything is off. Reality is blurred and warped. Things are born from fire instead of read and then burned, tumors are strategically buried inside bodies and not removed, color televisions are traded in for black and white ones. The all-seeing eye that moves with Doctor Tod (“Death”) Friendly is on perpetual rewind and rarely sees things clearly. “But wait a minute. The baby is crawling, only one or two panting inches at a time- but crawling forward. Hey! Christ, how long has it been since I…? Anyhow, it’s soon over, this lucid interval. The mother is reading backward again, and the baby is merely weeping. It wants its diaper filled with new shit from the trash. I’m being immature. I’ve got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever.” By using this approach, Amis is able to make sudden and profound statements on life, man, and society, and he is able to keep the time period and setting from completely overwhelming the story. Most readers know to expect violence in a story involving the Holocaust, and expectations are fulfilled here in the most striking manner. What is surprising about Time’s Arrow is where the violence fails to occur. Going counterclockwise in this story means reading passages where upholding the Hippocratic Oath is detestable and where injecting victims with acid or delivering Zyklon B is portrayed as almost a heartwarming gesture. “We’d just totaled a couple of teenage boys. Their mothers has brought them in and then got the hell out soon after we’d started work, staying only to witness the methodical unraveling of the soaked bandages. We took the stitches out and swabbed the boys with blood. I remember Witney’s skillful insertion of some kind of crossbow bolt; me, I was wedging shards of brown glass into the other boys’ crown. And we both, as they say, ‘cracked up.’ We laughed at each other, full face, showing at last with teeth and tongue and tonsils the mortal hilarity that sniggers behind everything we do here. Our laughter, together with the boys’ cries and whimpers…”Instead of breaking up families coming off the trains at Treblinka, the doctor plays matchmaker. How kind the good Nazi doctor is when he takes his own gold and fills the Jews’ teeth. The author creates a revisionist history here, winking at the reader, while the reader nods, smiles, and takes away a fuller knowledge of the truth. The whole thing is amazing, really. It takes a master craftsman to construct a place where “time’s arrow moves the other way.” The phrase “Life is best understood backwards” takes on depth here, and the author is thorough, linking the book’s title with the clocks at Treblinka, there “…to reassure the Jews- the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, and the Bialystok districts whom the camp had serviced…every station, every journey, needs a clock. The hands were painted and would never move to an earlier time. Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: ‘Change Here For Eastern Trains.’ But time had no arrow, not here.” Brutal, the forethought of that painted clock. And there, right there, the author makes a winning case for the suspension of time’s correct movement throughout his work. Time is gone here, in this book, because time was suspended and removed during that ugly period in history as well. This book is dark. Hope does not spring eternal here, but instead gives into the dark side, staring into the bleak void of a starved and hollowed eyed nihilism. It is disturbing, really, to read Amis’ words from a narrator that is like “a baby taken from the toilet,” having a heart but no face: “We cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life while the doctor watches.” If human beings remember only what they want to, I want to remember this book, if only to keep me from forgetting to tremble at the horrors of history.

Do You like book Time's Arrow (1992)?

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

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