Time’s Arrow
After I read Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time I was entranced by the idea of writing a book in which the arrow of time points in the other direction… backwards. About a year later I was dismayed/delighted to find that Martin Amis already had this idea. What a jerk. But, I have to say, his novel, Time’s Arrow, or the Nature of the Offense is brilliantly well-executed. One of the potential difficulties I imagined when I was thinking of writing like this is the disconnect between the reader’s internal narration of events and understanding of causality and the character’s experience. Additionally, there’s always the problem of presenting something that is abnormal in the real world as normal in the story, but still including the character’s observations. Amis solves this by separating the narrator, at least psychologically, from the person whose life is moving backwards. If it sounds complicated, it is. At first I was merely intrigued by the concept while reading and did not think about the content of the novel but then I realized that there’s something about moving backwards that allows Amis and his narrator to critically interact with the ‘real’ world, or, the one that I as a reader live in. For instance, moving backward obviously upsets causality and what better place to frustrate causality than in the hospital setting and the doctor-patient relationship. The narrator hates doctors because, as he observes, healthy people go into the hospital in order to get diseased organs implanted in their bodies or rusty nails inserted into their toes. They leave the hospital significantly worse off than when they arrived. All of these observations are complicated for the reader and there is a fair amount of thinking involved in reading this book. More so than usual; you have to turn things around frequently in order to tell what natural or frequently-occurring human event is being depicted. And as the narrator makes judgments on these events, you have to wrestle them into a comment on the other world, the reader’s world. The ‘wrestling’ is an amazing process because I realized quickly that many of the statements couldn’t simply be turned backwards to be ‘true.’ The novel is decidedly ambivalent about the role and function of doctors in society. Consider this exceptionally beautiful phrase,
“The air of the hospital is lukewarm, and it hums, and tastes of human organs obscurely neutralized or mistakenly preserved.”
The true critical power of the novel comes after the narrator follows the main character backwards, through several name-changes which hint at a secretive and unsettling past. The narrator uses clues to wonder at what might be in store for the character; a baby and wife is mentioned so the narrator waits to find out when they will enter the character’s life. The character moves backwards to Europe, to Lisbon, then to Italy and now the narrator is waiting for the war to start (end). Everywhere he comments on what it’s like before (after) a war: men are wandering Europe, there’s intense poverty, and everyone is praying:
“Europe, probably, is full of people like me, adjusting our stance for the lurch into war. So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else. Shame heats our cell, and press-ups, and prayers. Yes, prayers. His prayers are like the noise you make to drown out an insupportable thought.”
Amis has managed to keep the meaning of events, even while disabling time, by grounding his narrative in the emotional experience of the narrator and character (who often share emotions but not insights, since literally they are coming at things from completely different directions). The true power of the world he has created finally becomes clear when the character moves backwards into his position as a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz. The narrator describes how the Nazi’s have harnessed the power of creation; taking ash and making humans from it. He is not in awe however, because the doctor isn’t, he feels all the ambivalence, the disgust, the discomfort of the narrator and this is what saves the story from what could be an appropriation of the Holocaust for shock effect. More than anything though, it’s the prose:
“The dead look so dead. Dead bodies have their dead body language.”
The horrific work of the Nazi doctors is not disguised by moving backwards into time. That the Nazis assemble humans instead of disassembling them only draws further attention to the their crimes. After (before) the war, the narrator engages in assimilating Jews back into society, as is the Nazi goal. At thirteen the character is at Auschwitz, camping, and the line between what came before and what comes after is dismantled in the reader’s mind. How often do we narrate the events of childhood into a teleology, connecting events by the thinnest threads? The reader wants to see the connection between this Auschwitz and the other and the narrator wants us to see it to. The thirteen year old body, however, doesn’t have a clue.
One of things I really like about this novel, aside from the writing, is that Amis has managed to both comment on the writing/narrating process and society. It is a socially active novel while also pushing the limits of fiction writing. This was the first novel by Amis that I’ve read and I am mightily impressed, which is a welcomed change from the feeling I’ve had after reading most books this semester.
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