When Time's Arrow was published in 1991 it received a few doubting reviews but many more that were extravagant in their praise. These were fulsome even by the standard of the critical love letters that are so often directed at Martin Amis. Rose Tremain said: "Time's Arrow turns the bored, banjaxed, broken-hearted old reader into a breathless, bedazzled young reader for whom the novel becomes once again a source of illumination and an act of hope." James Wood described the book as "a stunning achievement, perilous and daring". Time's Arrow also had the distinction – absurdly – of being the only novel by Amis Jnr to be nominated for the Booker prize.
Now though, I suspect it is viewed as one of his lesser works. A search on Google, , brings up far fewer results (by a factor of at least 2:1) for reviews of Time's Arrow than for London Fields or The Information. (Money and Experience have even more results, but too many of those must be false positives). And, speaking personally, unlike other Amis books, I've never had much of an urge to read it. I always thought that the idea of a novel about the Holocaust told backwards, through the eyes of someone living inside the head of a Nazi war criminal, seemed like too much of a gimmick. Carrying it off successfully seemed quite a task, even for someone of Amis's prodigious talent. Now I have read it, I'm only more sure I was right.
The war criminal in question is introduced to us, at the moment of his death, as an old man in the US. It is then that the nameless narrator emerges from darkness, trapped inside this newly revived man's head, a fully-formed separate intelligence. He immediately starts cracking jokes (then dissecting them with further displays of wit) and revelling in his own well-turned phrases, telling of nurse's uniforms making "a packety sound", "the quiet ambition of every homestead" and "a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes". In spite of his gorgeous eloquence and oh-so-smart banter, the narrator is confused. He has no control over the body he finds himself in, and doesn't understand why birds are singing strangely, or why everybody walks and speaks backwards.
"What is the – what is the sequence of the journey I am on? What are its rules?" Amis has him ask, clanging as many bells as he can for confused readers. The sequence is that the recently dead war criminal is living his life in rewind, from comfortable retirement in the north-east of the US, to a career as a hospital doctor (in which he gives money to patients for making them feel worse), to life as a fugitive, to Auschwitz, where he brings Jews back to life, reunites them with their families and sends them home.
If it feels vaguely secondhand, that's because it is. In an afterword, Amis readily acknowledges inspiration from "a certain paragraph – a famous one – from Kurt Vonnegut". This must be the passage in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five where Billy Pilgrim watches a backwards-run film of the American planes scooping up bombs from Dresden and miraculously repairing the ruined city, before the bombs are sent back to a factory where all the dangerous contents of their cylinders are separated into harmless minerals. Where war becomes a process of redemption and healing, an unarguable point is made about the real thing's horror and idiocy.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, this is a moment of power, an astonishing revelation – the Joycean epiphany familiar to anyone who has done practical criticism exams at A-level. In Time's Arrow, sadly, it just seems like a conceit stretched too far and too thin. We become aware that the Nazi doctor is going to heal his victims many pages before the climactic scenes at Auschwitz, so the point has been made long before we get to it. And far too many cracks have begun to show by this stage. Especially the problem that a witty and wise narrator fails to work out the obvious fact that time is moving backwards, and so continues expressing confusion until the end.
Amis also repeats the same joke – that the world seems pretty odd when it's running backwards – again and again. New York cab-passengers often hang around on street corners for hours after they have been dropped off, marvelling at the efficiency with which they were initially picked up. Government workers go around dropping litter on the streets, while citizens collect it. Relationships are begun with break-up arguments … Because it's Amis, each joke is well-told, but the repetition soon grates.
There are compensations. Other jokes are good. There's funny stuff about pooing backwards and a few good lines about lovers' tiffs being meaningless anyway ("But with this man-woman stuff you could run them anyway you like and still get no further…"). There's also a force to the uneasy fit of this blithe humour with the horror of the Holocaust. A horror that Amis succeeds in making all too vivid. But none of that is enough to stop this book feeling slight, to me. What do you think – did I get it wrong?
