Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that's fundamentally unspeakable? Amis' solution is a deft literary conceit of narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the person of one man, ex-Nazi doctor Tod T. Friendly. One identity wakes at the moment of Friendly's death and runs backwards in time, like a movie played in reverse, (e.g., factory smokestacks scrub the air clean,) unaware of the terrible past he approaches. The "normal" consciousness runs in time's regular direction, fleeing his ignominious history.


From Library Journal
For decades, writers have been striving to comprehend the Holocaust, and while its horror remains indelible, readers may wonder if there is another way of going over this relentlessly examined ground. In this swift, incisive little book, Amis succeeds in rendering the shock of the Holocaust wholly new by traveling backward in time. At the end of his life, the German-born American doctor Tod T. Friendly suffers a paralysis from which emerges "the soul he should have had." This innocent soul follows "time's arrow" back through Tod's stay in America and his flight to Germany, finally arriving at the concentration camp where Friendly, as Odilo Unverdorben, served as a doctor of death. Trying to discover "when the world is going to make sense," the confused if patient soul watches as the doctor injures the healed, revives Jews who have been gassed, and grows closer to his estranged wife. It concludes, "We all know by now that violence creates, here on earth . . . it heals and mends." Amis's device, which at first seems merely a clever conceit, is handled so skillfully that living backwards becomes not only natural but a perfect metaphor for the Nazis' perverted logic. If he can't finally probe to the bottom of a mind that embraces atrocities, Amis has nevertheless written a thought-provoking, compelling book. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Amis this time writes about Tod Friendly, a.k.a John Young, a.k.a Odilo Unverdorben--a doctor with a chilling past no one knows about: he was a medical experimenter under Mengele at Auschwitz. No one knows--that is, except his soul, his conscience, which narrates this book: backwards. Literally backwards--not in flashbacks, but everything like a film run in reverse, with construction become destruction, age become youth, horror become innocence. ``You want to know what I do?'' asks the narrator during his stint as trauma doctor. ``All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don't mess about. We'll soon have that off. He's got a hole in his head. So what do we do. We stick a nail in it. Get the nail--a good rusty one--from the trash or whatever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he's allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night. Already we're busy with this baglady we've got, welding sock and shoe plastic on to the soles of her evil feet.'' Dialogue is equally in reverse order, so that you learn the trick of reading up from the page to get the full effect. The problem here is that Amis's cleverness has a glare-y insistence to it that undercuts the moralism it means to reflect. Like London Fields, the book is mostly at home in contemporary jeremiad: about New York, about modern sex, about the homeless, about the horror that doctors so blithely encounter. The Auschwitz material, coming last, also comes least--weakened by the narration's trickiness into seeming inevitable (though Amis puts a psychosexual spin on its roots, … la the Reichianism of his mentor Saul Bellow) and inhospitable to the stylistic flair that Amis can impart to even the worst contemporary sins. The chipped impressionism simply and unimpressively reads like the worst facts culled from the great annals of Martin Gilbert and Lucy Dawidowicz. Amis's particularity as a writer--the ethical outrage plus the gorgeously soiled, infinitely plastic style--is still remarkable: but his nimbleness on the stage of the global, historical, Big Picture theater serves him less and less well. The Holocaust couldn't care less about his ingenuity, which turns terribilit… into mere tour de force. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


From the Inside Flap
In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.

"The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art."--Newsday


About the Author
Martin Amis is the best-selling author of several books, including London Fields, Money, The Information, and, most recently, Experience. He lives in London.

ANNOTATION

"A novel that seems to have been written with the term 'tour de force' in mind . . . Amis's radical rethinking of time . . . brings the abomination of the Holocaust home to the jaded late-20th-century reader in a way that few conventional novels could." Village Voice Literary Supplement. "Splendid . . . bold . . . gripping from start to finish."--Los Angeles Times Book Review.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.

"The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art."—Newsday

FROM THE CRITICS

Los Angeles Times

Splendid . . . bold . . . gripping from start to finish.

Michiko Kakutani

. . .an inverted time scheme has been used before. . . .But whereas [other] stories moved from the disillusionment of time present back to the idealism and hopefulness of time pastMr. Amis' story moves from phony innocence to a past of unrelieved horror. . . .it's a risky narrative strategy. . . the top-heavy jokey part of the book overshadows its somber conclusionblunting its larger moral ambitions. —The New York Times

Library Journal

For decades, writers have been striving to comprehend the Holocaust, and while its horror remains indelible, readers may wonder if there is another way of going over this relentlessly examined ground. In this swift, incisive little book, Amis succeeds in rendering the shock of the Holocaust wholly new by traveling backward in time. At the end of his life, the German-born American doctor Tod T. Friendly suffers a paralysis from which emerges ``the soul he should have had.'' This innocent soul follows ``time's arrow'' back through Tod's stay in America and his flight to Germany, finally arriving at the concentration camp where Friendly, as Odilo Unverdorben, served as a doctor of death. Trying to discover ``when the world is going to make sense,'' the confused if patient soul watches as the doctor injures the healed, revives Jews who have been gassed, and grows closer to his estranged wife. It concludes, ``We all know by now that violence creates, here on earth . . . it heals and mends.'' Amis's device, which at first seems merely a clever conceit, is handled so skillfully that living backwards becomes not only natural but a perfect metaphor for the Nazis' perverted logic. If he can't finally probe to the bottom of a mind that embraces atrocities, Amis has nevertheless written a thought-provoking, compelling book. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91.--Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Michiko Kakutani