Baltimore Online Book Club: A review of Martin Amis's Novel, "Time's Arrow"

Time's Arrow or The Nature of the Offense
Vintage books
New York, 1991
165 pages
by Martin Amis

In a recent meeting of the offline version of the Baltimore Online Book Club, the topic of discussion was Martin Amis’s novel, Time’s Arrow, which was first published in 1991 to mostly positive reviews.  Five out of six of our members liked it as well, with various degrees of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, I couldn’t agree.  Time’s Arrow, despite some positive qualities, is, in my opinion, a failed novel.

The title is a term used in physics.  According to Einstein’s equations, time can either proceed forwards or backwards, but this never happens in the phenomenal world. In our universe, or at least in our section of the universe, time’s arrow always hurls into the future, and thus toward greater disorder.  It’s easy to break an egg; it’s impossible to perfectly reconstruct it.

A novel is a work of the imagination and need not obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics, (which it, of course, does, just like everything else—we age as we read it).  In this work of fiction, the arrow of time shoots exclusively into the past. We begin with a doctor’s death in America, presumably around the time the novel was written, (it was first published in 1991).  He recovers, gets younger and younger, until we reach the period of his life--his past—that is, his future—which he had been trying his best to conceal.  He  has a lot to hide: he was a “doctor” at Auschwitz and assisted “Uncle Pepi,” a monster based on the notorious Dr. Mengele.    In Auschwitz, the antihero, who will adopt /has adopted various names in the future/past to hide his identity, returns to the one he was born with, Odilo Unverdorben.

A lecturer in Germany once said, “Der Holocaust verjährt nie”—the Holocaust always remains contemporary.  I never forgot that sentence.  The genocide against the Jews was so horrible that it has become a huge black hole in the center of civilization’s galaxy.  However bathed in light we are as we revolve around a star at the periphery, we know now that an ominous singularity exists at the very heart of humanity, a fact which has torn the naive optimism of the Enlightenment to shreds, from which it can never fully recover. Reversing time, in order to return us to the now of the Holocaust, thus illustrating its contemporaneity, is an original and potentially very effective concept.

But Amis doesn't realize this potential.  We do not return to a black hole; here Auschwitz is just another shade of gray.  There are no characterizations in this novel, no Ann Franks, no Primo Levis.  Everything is anonymous and dream-like; if a reader is unaware of the scope of the Nazi genocide, the novel might appear as little more than a bad dream from which he could wake and read something else.

The writing of the novel was inspired by a book written by a friend of Amis's entitled, The Nazi Doctors.

Since Amis’s novel contains no memorable characters, the originality of the book must lie elsewhere.  We have already mentioned the reversal of time.  At first, this reversal seems to be a brilliant device, but it gets tedious after a while.  For instance, reading conversations from the bottom up wears the reader down after the first couple of examples.  (Actually, if Amis were consistent, not only the sentences of dialogue would be reversed, but the words themselves would have to be reversed as well, thus reducing dialogue to gibberish.)  Since his target is not the creation of vividly drawn characterization, Amis aims his arrow at originality of language and symbolism; I think he tries too hard.  His model was apparently Joyce, but Amis is no Joyce—the latter had an exquisite ear for the music of language.  There are, however, some fine images throughout the book.  An example: when Unverdorben examines an emaciated inmate, the bell of the stethoscope is said to bridge the unfortunate man’s ribs, since his flesh has receded due to starvation.  This is a memorable image.  My favorite sentence by Amis so far, however, occurs in the afterword: “The National Socialists found the core of the reptile brain, and built an autobahn that went there."  True, and well said.   There are, however, unfortunate sentences as well.  This one occurs on page 155: “I am excoriated by erotic revanchism.”  I’m not sure what Amis wished to convey by this sentence; it is, however, jejeune and ugly.

The novel is narrated by someone or something inside the antihero.  (We never hear from Unverdorben directly.) This entity might be his soul or his conscience; it is never really clear.  I think it is mostly just a narrative device.

On page 125, this inner being, presumably born in Germany along with the body it inhabits, says the following:

It’s a funny language, German,  For one thing, everybody shouts it.  All those very long words: the literalism, the tinkertoy accumulation.  It sounds pushy, beginning every sentence with a verb like that.  And take the first person singular: ich. “Ich” Not a masterpiece of reassurance, is it?... It’s like the sound a child makes when it confronts its own…

No it isn’t Mr. Amos.  It’s not pronounced ick or isch.  It must be spoken softly high up on the palate.  English speakers have a hard time getting it right, tending to pronounce it in a harsh, hissing or guttural manner; Mr. Amis has apparently never seriously tried.  He’s wrong about the literalism as well—German is one of the most imagistic languages of  all. I give one example: Vorstellung, composed of the prefix, before, vor, and the verb stellen, to put or to place.  The image conveys to a German speaker something put before one.  This single word must be translated into the much more literal English, as a performance (something put on stage); an introduction, (that is, a person brought to the attention of another during an introduction), and as something that the mind puts before itself, an idea.  Literalism?  In addition, German nouns can be constructed from basic nouns, suffixes and prefixes that, once combined,  can provide a new and readily understood meaning; this is why Germans hardly need to consult a dictionary, except, of course for borrowings from another language.  In German, it is perfectly permissible to be creative and coin your own words using hitherto unknown combinations of smaller parts of speech—I have done this many times myself.  Amis's phrase for this process, "tinkertoy accumulation," is merely an indication of his utter ignorance of the language of Goethe, Kafka, and Schiller.

What I especially object to, however,  is the injection of Amis’s anti-German prejudices into a narrator who, as a speaker of German, would not have been able to share them.  In addition, Amis makes mistakes that one with a knowledge of German would instantly recognize.  (For instance, it’s “Inhalationsraum” not “Inhalationsraume.”  Shouldn’t the author have found an editor who could have corrected errors such as this?)

This novel, as we have already mentioned, totally lacks vividness in its portrayal of that horrible period.  For this we need to turn to other authors, such as Primo Levi.  I would also include two German works; the first is a novel, "Jakob the Liar," by Jürek Becher, who survived the camps as did Levi.  The novel takes place toward the end of the Second World War in a ghetto that has become a prison for Polish Jews; Nazis treat them like swine.  Jakob claims he has a radio and that he has heard that the Russians are victorious and will soon liberate them.  This is not true, but his fellow Jews, desperate for good news, believe it. The suicide rate diminishes.  There are many aspects of this novel which I will never forget. (It was made into a so-so movie starring Robin Williams; the original East German/Czech version is, however,  vastly superior.)  The second work is "Amon,” in which a young, mixed-race (white and black) German woman discovers in adulthood that her grandfather was the notorious Amon, who served inhumanity as the Kommandant of Auschwitz.The subtitle of this true account is “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me.”  It tells a harrowing story with, however, a happy ending.  Jennifer is fully accepted by her many Israeli friends, since she is completely innocent and philo-Semitic to boot.  The book gives us hope for the future.

I have reviewed both books, in German; they can be found on my blog. It is no exaggeration to claim that both of these works are much more memorable than Amis’s novel.

You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.

1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
6. Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. Pierre or the Ambiguities by Herman Melville

Our next meeting will take place on June 28, 2017.  On that date, the six members of our group will discuss "The Wapshot Chronicles" by John Cheever; I will post my review shorty thereafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review.   I wish you pleasurable reading!