Martin Amis’s 2014 novel The Zone of Interest, which was the basis for last year’s Oscar-winning film adaptation, wasn’t his first foray into Holocaust fiction; he explored the same subject in a very different fashion in 1991’s Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence, which is one of the most brilliant works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. The entire novel takes place in reverse, narrated by a second consciousness inside of a person who has just died – or un-died, and will go through life backwards through the eyes of our narrator.
Tod T. Friendly, as the newly alived person is known when the novel begins, is a doctor in the U.S. whose life will ravel across the pages, moving into his career, his carnal affairs, and eventually out of the country and back to his place of origin. While there is a big mystery that the nameless narrator is trying to figure out, he (I’m assuming a gender here) also discusses some of the most, uh, personal biological matters – but in reverse. Imagine defecation, but you sit on the toilet for the feces to go into your colon. You “eat,” but food exits your stomach and ends up on the plate intact. The narrator’s matter-of-fact descriptions of these and other mundane matters of life, such as any financial transactions, make the novel quite funny almost all of the way through … until, of course, we get to Tod T. Friendly’s younger days and our narrator has to make sense of the senseless.
Part of the genius of Time’s Arrow is in its construction; there has been plenty of fiction where time flows backwards in some fashion, with Memento (or maybe Irréversible) the best-known example. Philip K. Dick wrote something very similar in his novel Counter-Clock World, where time begins to flow backwards for everyone, so they live their lives in reverse. Amis’s conceit here is that the man we meet as Tod T. Friendly lived his life in normal, forward-flowing time; the narrator experiences it in the wrong direction, so he misunderstands causality and conceives wrong and often hilarious explanations for all sorts of events.
The other bit of genius is the same that Amis displayed in The Zone of Interest: he uses the Holocaust as a backdrop for a novel that simultaneously isn’t about the Holocaust … but it also is. It’s such a tightrope for any artist to walk, mining one of the worst episodes in human history for absurd comedy that also helps reveal things about the human condition. The Zone of Interest explored the banality of evil. Time’s Arrow shows how unthinkable the Nazis’ atrocities were: they make sense to our narrator, sort of, because he sees events in reverse. You have to turn history on its head to see any sense in it at all. Viewed normally, the actions of the Nazis, as a group or individually, are just inexplicable.
Time’s Arrow runs a scant 168 pages, which is probably about as far as you could take a gimmick like this, between the bathroom humor that populates the majority of the book and then the glimpses inside a concentration camp. There’s a limit to how far an author can go with either of those ideas – I certainly don’t want more scatological humor than this novel offers, and I don’t know how Amis could have spent any more time on the atrocities themselves without turning this into a very different sort of book. It is unique, and it works spectacularly well as a brisk, witty, often silly read that left me with deep unease and broader philosophical questions.
Next up: Anne de Marcken’s novella It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, the winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.