Time's Arrow

At the moment of Dr Tod T. Friendly's death, a consciousness is born and then witnesses the doctor's entire life - lived backwards. The voice trails the doctor through his early retirement, his last years of work and degenerating relationships, then back through his heyday as a surgeon, his life in New York, various name changes, and then back via ship to postwar Europe. At first nothing seems to make sense for the narrating consciousness: people are talking and walking backwards; relationships begin with tearful meetings and slapped faces and end with coy moments in hospital corridors; mysterious, coded letters emerge from the flames of the fireplace; and the doctor and his colleagues work passionately at making healthy people sick, or wounding them and throwing them into ambulances to be taken back onto the streets. But finally, when we follow the good doctor back to his time at Auschwitz, life begins to make sense at last. There, he and his colleagues are doing something wonderful: they are creating the Jewish race. Pulling smoke and ashes from the sky, assembling the debris into human beings, bringing them to life with gas, letting them work their way into health, then uniting them with family members and sending them off by train to flourish in the towns and cities of Europe... What at first seems like a rather trivial exercise in literary game-playing - the conceit of narrating a life lived backwards - becomes, in fact, the device which enables Amis to deliver one of the most effective and affecting condemnations of the Holocaust without writing a single word against it. By showing it in reverse - by inverting its objectives, its sequence and its consequences - Amis renders the Nazi program in all its grotesque obscenity. The camps are plainly revealed as the sickening inversion, the opposite, of everything good in the world: love, decency, creativity, freedom. Many have noted that these places, these crimes, have an existential meaning beyond politics or shock or pity. They have become symbols of our own inturned nihilism. As Peter Handke has explained, the idea of the camps is so compelling for us because in them the whole of life's demonic undertow has found, at last, its specific image. Amis draws it clearly - he shows us how and why Handke's statement is true, and that makes this bold and striking novel essential reading.

Tod Friendly, a doctor living in the US, dies. Somehow an alter ego of Dr. Friendly is born during his death and proceeds to live his life backwards. He watches people walk backwards and talk backwards as he lives Friendly's life in reverse all the way back to his birth. We find out that the good doctor hides a horrible secret in his past-He was a Holocaust Doctor who experimented on Jews and others at Auschwitz during World War 2. Amis uses this unique approach and it works well until the very end which I thought got a little too mystical for me. It is a short book (I agree with others who say that any longer and the backwards-in-time trick would've been a bit much) that is at time hilarious and powerful. Reading the section about his experimentations on the prisoners in Aushwitz was horrible, and the irony of the whole situation (since the doctor's alter ego is watching it backward, he believes that many Jews were actually brought to life by the death camp) is not lost at all. I highly recommend it.

The way I personally rate books is dependent on how much of an impression they have made on me. This one made a big one--why? Because it is written backwards. As in, there is a foreign mind in a certain man's head who travels with him in the reverse of his life. It sounds a little complex, but it's really not. The way this other man without a body (who is only a visitor in this man's brain) views the world is entirely in reverse. People walk backwards. Doctors make people sick (because they are all stitched up when they leave, and bloody when they come in, and this is shown in reverse).The book is about a mostly overdone topic--the Holocaust. However, this "backwards" approach freshens it up a bit and makes it all the more real somehow. The mass murders and hidious mutilations of the body in the concentration camps are viewed by the narrator as a sort of creation, because in the reverse view the Nazi's take hold of the dead bodies, or the ashes, and make them into live humans again.While I was reading the book it was a little difficult to keep remembering that things were happening in the reverse. When I took breaks from reading my sense of time was a little distorted, as I kept thinking in reverse(even when not reading the book). This book is certainly worth it if you want something to change your perceptions on the world a little.

When I first picked up this book, I was worried that the whole "backwards time thing" would be just another literary gimmick with no depth. Then I started reading it -- and found myself sitting around the house unable to remember whether I was supposed to tie my shoes or put them on first... and a friend of mine said, when she read it, that she "would wake up in the middle of the night having to consciously think about which direction time was going."To my mind, this psychological/temporal craziness makes a certain kind of unthinkability real (in literary form) -- and thus makes the mindset of Nazi (or any) atrocity real in a way that conventional wisdom, with its constant labelling of all atrocity as committed by some "evil other," could never do.The fact that one would have to so maul the basic temporality of existence just to get into the head of the committer of atrocity and have it make any sense at all is incredibly powerful.What's more, the incredible horrific irony of many of the actual medical scenes breaks down (at least in this reader) any possibility of "desensitization to violence." All I had to do was think of dead Jews piled in a room, then filled with the "life-giving Zyklon-B" and shipped back to idyllic homelands, to shock me into feeling the true horror of genocidal politics.

From beginning to end, Amis has managed to sustain a wonderful conceit: the inversion of time. The idea isn't original but this execution is complete and nearly perfect. Yes, the story somewhat pays homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five but it is a weak parallel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book where time is treated non-linearly and yet the narrative follows more or less the conventional marching forward. A better example really is T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone where a major character lives backwards in time. Merlin comes from the future, converges towards the age of young King Arthur and sweeps past into the past. In Time's Arrow, the narrator from the very first words "I moved forward, out of the blackest sleep, ..." experiences time inverted. From death to birth, the narrator must learn of the past by experiencing the world - he is naive as to the events of the past - day-by-day inside Tod's body (growing younger). Tod is the Nazi war criminal whose secret life unfolds - backwards. Oddly, the narrator appears naive has he is forced to speculate on the past based only on his knowledge of the present and future. He does not know the past. And he is often wrong, just as we are in predicting the future. Perhaps the most puzzingly aspect of the novel is the identity of the narrator. The narrator may be the protagonist or may be not ...It is ambiguous. Certainly, the narrator "rides" in the head of Tod Friendly (and his aliases) but he experiences the world mechanically like a closed circuit security camera. The narrator can only see and smell and hear what Tod sees and smells and hears. The narrator can not experience the thoughts or emotions of Tod. Strange but very rewarding. The narrator does see Tod's dreams. All very disorienting.But the de-familiarization of this backwards world has a peculiar effect on the re-telling of the atrocities of Auschwitz. Simply, narrator cuts through this horrifyingly familiar world of evil and allows the reader to ponder it as new - just as the naive narrator encounters it all for the first time.In short, this is a great book not because of its virtuosity in creating an inverted world, but by opening up a new possibility in literature. Why not tell stories backwards? Knowing what we know now, can we predict the past? Funnily enough, the world of science - geology, biology - is all too familiar with this novelty. It is only in literature where time must march forward.