Martin Amis

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From Death to Birth

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SOURCE: "From Death to Birth," in The New York Times Book Review, November 17, 1991, p. 15.

[In the following review of Time's Arrow, Lehman focuses on the reversed chronological order of the book's narrative and the intent of Amis's technique.]

My 8-year-old son, an expert at videocassette recorders, wondered one day, "Why can't we rewind time?" The question in all its blunt naïveté suggests the imaginative conceit at the heart of Martin Amis's remarkable new novel, Time's Arrow. Mr. Amis explores how life would appear, how it would feel and what sense it would seem to make if it were a film running backward—if time's arrow were to reverse its direction and a recording angel, along for the ride, permitted us to watch history (which Lord Byron called "the devil's scripture") as it is unwritten, line by line, gesture by gesture, until the perpetrators of the 20th century vanish into their mother's wombs.

The vehicle for this experiment in chronology—you might call it a fictional deconstruction of time—is the backward narration of one man's life. Mr. Amis's protagonist is a shady character, a doctor known retrogressively as Tod T. Friendly, John Young, Hamilton de Souza and Odilo Unverdorben. There is a good deal of onomastic playfulness at work here, since "Tod" means death in German, a language of considerable importance in this short novel; "friendly" is life in America, land of benign forgetfulness, where no one inquires too closely about the suave European stranger in town; and "young" is what he gets to be as the book goes along.

Time's Arrow begins on Tod Friendly's deathbed in "affable, melting-pot, primary-color, You're-okay-I'm-okay America." Weeks go by. He is released from the hospital. Immediately he has a heart attack in his garden. Then comes a car crash, followed by "the first installment" of his love life, a fight with a woman named Irene, who tells him she knows his dark "secret" because he says it in his sleep. Irene visits more frequently. There are other women as well. Tod meets them where he works, in the offices of American Medical Services on a commercial strip somewhere in New England. It is clear that he is on the run. Every December he gets a letter in primitive code advising him that the weather continues to be "temperate" in New York. One year he reads that the weather, "although recently unsettled, is temperate once more!"

In time, Tod moves to New York, where he has an emergency meeting with a sinister clergyman who warns him of danger—the Immigration and Naturalization Service might act to revoke his citizenship. Backward he proceeds until, in the summer of 1948, he sets sail "for Europe, and for war." He continues to shed false identities until the narrative finally catches up with the horrifying secret deep in his past, which holds the key to the riddles in his personality and life: Odilo Unverdorben was a Nazi doctor, a dealer of death in Auschwitz, where he administered the poison gas used to kill Jews. In the book's relentless backward logic, he "personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B [from the shower room] and entrusted them to the pharmacist."

For the tale to have maximum impact, Mr. Amis needs an utterly naive narrator who is ignorant of modern history and unaware that backward is not the way things are supposed to go. Postulating a split in his protagonist's personality, Mr. Amis tells the story from the point of view of the man's alienated psyche or soul, condemned to witness events without comprehending them. There is pathos in the widening discrepancy between the reader's knowledge and that of the ghostly narrator. From the latter's warped vantage point, Auschwitz is a culmination, the one place where the world makes sense. Previously, the world was illogical. On American streets, adults snatch toys from children and sanitation workers dispense rubbish. People are "always looking forward to going places they've just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye."

Doctors and hospitals especially, mystify the narrator, for—in backward time—patients enter well and leave sick, while mothers go to the hospital to return their babies. In Auschwitz, however, creation is accomplished, since murder, at reverse speed, appears to be the giving of life. Out of ashes and feces, the Jews are assembled—"the bald girls with their enormous eyes. Just made, and all raw from their genesis." Indeed, for the spectral narrator, Auschwitz is where the medical profession works wonders, undoing death on an unprecedented scale.

Mr. Amis's vision of the Holocaust undone is particularly moving. In Auschwitz, the gold is restored to the corpses' teeth: "To prevent needless suffering the dental work was usually completed while the patients were not yet alive." Then the bodies return to life in the "Sprinkleroom." In this version of history, on Kristallnacht the Nazis "all romped and played and helped the Jews." The racial laws are repealed; the Jews have the rights of citizens. The novel ends with the annihilation of the Nazi doctor's consciousness—not by death but by birth—concurrent with the restoration to health and prosperity of the Jews in pre-Nazi Germany.

Since the definitions of "verdorben" in German include "corrupt" or "fallen." Mr Amis's name for his damnable doctor takes on a double meaning. In an inverted world, "Unverdorben" might be the word for corrupt. But the word can also mean the opposite—innocent, unfallen, as if original sin could be undone. As his wordplay suggests, Mr Amis—the author of London Fields and Money and the perennial bad boy of English letters—is a writer of wit and post-modernist invention, who sets traps of ironies for readers to stumble into. But there is a moral purpose to Mr. Amis's experiments with narrative strategy and metaphysical possibility. The novel's inversions of causality and chronology seem perfectly in keeping with the Nazis' inversion of morality. In this sense, Time's Arrow implicitly warns us against turning the world of logic upside down or inside out—the very thing Mr. Amis does in this fiction.

The backward structure allows Mr. Amis to solve several narrative problems. As in a detective novel or psychoanalytic session, the climax occurs with the reconstruction of events that took place long ago. In addition, with his ghostly narrator Mr. Amis gets the benefit of both the first-person and the third-person points of view. The effect is like that of schizophrenia or, in the religious terms Mr. Amis seems to prefer, the divorce of the soul from the rest of a man's being. Most audacious is Mr. Amis's appropriation of erasure—the definitive motif of deconstruction—which he applies to the genocide of the Jews. The very instrument of revisionist history is put to the service of heartbreaking fiction.

In Time's Arrow, Martin Amis has written a book rich in poignancy and savage indignation.

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