Martin Amis

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Backward Steps

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SOURCE: "Backward Steps," in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 4, No. 170, September 27, 1991, p. 55.

[In the following negative review, Taylor discusses the time structure of Time's Arrow, calling the novel "an entertaining conceit wound out to extravagant length."]

The "time's arrow" metaphor has obviously been knocking around in Martin Amis' consciousness for a year or two. Nearly used as the title of what became London Fields, it now surfaces at the masthead of this ingeniously bulked out novella—one of those short books that have been artfully got up to resemble a medium-sized book, with a price to match.

The arrow in question points backwards: a man's life viewed in reverse by an observant but understandably baffled intelligence, defined as "the soul he should have had, who came at the wrong time, after it was too late".

The note of dislocation, whether actual or spiritual, is a constant. Our acquaintance with septuagenarian Tod Friendly begins on his deathbed (a hospital stake-out attended by levées of doctors) subsequently taking in a back-to-front recapitulation of his career.

As a conceit, it is meticulously done, each gesture and inflection fitting perfectly into the reverse tape loop, so that the general effect resembles a video on the rewind: the puzzling cars with their five reverse gears, the server's arbitrary pocketing of the ball that concludes a point in tennis, the bewildering ritual of eating out ("Rounding it off with a cocktail, we finish our meal and sit there doggedly describing it to the waiter, with the menu there to jog our memory").

Nervously joky at first, the narrative soon reveals a great deal of potentially disturbing baggage: the capering demons of Tod's dreams, the hint of a heavily camouflaged past, or rather future. And sure enough, having sped through Tod's time as a none too scrupulous American medic and his burdensome love life, the path stretches back, by means of aliases and subterfuge, to the unpromising chaos of central Europe—where, as a functionary at Auschwitz and Treblinka, "Odilo Unverdorben" assists in the destruction of the Jews.

Here the tape loop works its most chilling trick. The gas-chambers, naturally enough, have the effect of creating life. Enlightenment is urged on the alter-ego, "on the day I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life …" The book ends somewhere in the wastes of early 1920s childhood, Odilo and his "soul" having parted company shortly before the second world war.

A reviewer should always declare an interest: here is mine. I grew up, in a manner of speaking, with Martin Amis. I read The Rachel Papers, covertly, in the school library, bought Success in my first term at university and thought Money the finest English novel of the 1980s. Even London Fields, for all its prolixity, still seems immeasurably better than the chaff that excluded it from the 1989 Booker shortlist. It is curious that Time's Arrow, despite its dexterous sleight of hand, the occasional elevation of its prose into something very near poetry and the conspicuous engagement with "maturity", should end up as a disappointment.

The explanation is, I imagine, half to do with Amis and half to do with the circumstances in which he writes; half to do with an awareness that the moral high ground that he occupies occasionally gets sacrificed to the joke, half to do with the whole postmodern prohibition of representational writing.

Here, for example, is an account of possibly the greatest act of inhumanity in the history of humanity, and it is done by means of a device—a telling and fruitful device, but a device all the same. All this is in keeping with the postmodern ukase, in which a supposedly extraordinary reality requires an extraordinary treatment. Or as Eva Figes once put it: "The English social realist tradition cannot contain the realities of my lifetime, horrors which one might have called surreal if they had not actually happened."

Novelists who continue to produce "realistic" patchworks of bygone experience commonly have critics lining up to inform them that it is impossible to write like that any more. Yet Time's Arrow, which employs any amount of modish trickery, has the odd effect of making the reader pine for a slightly staider technique—one which would provide an adequate vehicle for human feeling. With any luck, hindsight will show this to have been a halfway house between brilliant but flawed juvenilia and resplendent mid-period achievement. At the moment, it is only an entertaining conceit wound out to extravagant length.

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