Time's Arrow

Rating:
Summary: Can you say brilliant?
Review: Amis, easily one of the top contemporary authors,proves once again that his unique vision can be both ingenius and illusive. In Time's Arrow he proves that the line between good and evil can be blurred with a simple device, in this case telling the story in reverse.

Dr. Friendly's tale, as told by Amis, shows good as a banal force that can be twisted at the will of the storyteller. Doctors become butchers and smokestacks scrub the sky. However, evil remains evil in the hands of even the most skilled wordsmith. Nazis, in this novel, are no longer genocidal automitons. They become god-playing fanatics who mirror their supreme being by creating human life from the ashes of nazi camp ovens.

Amis never ceases to amaze me and this book delivers on levels literary, philisophical, historical and ethical.

Rating:
Summary: Dreadful in its optimism
Review: As the impact of the holocaust recedes out of living memory forever, Amis renders the event anew. The narrator is an intelligent passenger inside the head of a man as his life unfolds in reverse. The narrator is intelligent, though his conclusions are based upon a world where letters first spring from fire and then are read, and where life is mended with the knife's edge. As a result, the narrator's perspective on events are innocent and pure like a child's. The effect is [hopefully] to re-awaken the world so they do not forget.
With highly praised films such as "Life is Beautiful" portraying the holocaust as a Disney World, works like this one by Amis are increasingly more important.
Aside from the obvious subject which isn't overtly revealed until the last quarter of the book, this little post-modern narrative experiment also reveals much more about the human condition where chess boards are painstakingly organized from chaos, the participant celebrate their work with a handshake, and the world moves towards a green promised land. A land that is known to exist, and it is only a matter of time before it is reached.

Rating:
Summary: Impressive. Ought to have won the Booker Prize in '91
Review: From beginning to end, Amis has managed to sustain a wonderful conceit: the inversion of time. The idea isn't original but this execution is complete and nearly perfect. Yes, the story somewhat pays homage to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five but it is a weak parallel. Slaughterhouse-Five is a book where time is treated non-linearly and yet the narrative follows more or less the conventional marching forward. A better example really is T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone where a major character lives backwards in time. Merlin comes from the future, converges towards the age of young King Arthur and sweeps past into the past.

In Time's Arrow, the narrator from the very first words "I moved forward, out of the blackest sleep, ..." experiences time inverted. From death to birth, the narrator must learn of the past by experiencing the world - he is naive as to the events of the past - day-by-day inside Tod's body (growing younger). Tod is the Nazi war criminal whose secret life unfolds - backwards. Oddly, the narrator appears naive has he is forced to speculate on the past based only on his knowledge of the present and future. He does not know the past. And he is often wrong, just as we are in predicting the future.

Perhaps the most puzzingly aspect of the novel is the identity of the narrator. The narrator may be the protagonist or may be not ...It is ambiguous. Certainly, the narrator "rides" in the head of Tod Friendly (and his aliases) but he experiences the world mechanically like a closed circuit security camera. The narrator can only see and smell and hear what Tod sees and smells and hears. The narrator can not experience the thoughts or emotions of Tod. Strange but very rewarding. The narrator does see Tod's dreams. All very disorienting.

But the de-familiarization of this backwards world has a peculiar effect on the re-telling of the atrocities of Auschwitz. Simply, narrator cuts through this horrifyingly familiar world of evil and allows the reader to ponder it as new - just as the naive narrator encounters it all for the first time.

In short, this is a great book not because of its virtuosity in creating an inverted world, but by opening up a new possibility in literature. Why not tell stories backwards? Knowing what we know now, can we predict the past? Funnily enough, the world of science - geology, biology - is all too familiar with this novelty. It is only in literature where time must march forward.

Rating:
Summary: Book amazing an!
Review: Great it's! It read just! Them read don't -- plot the about much too reveal book the of back the on summary the and reviews the.

Rating:
Summary: Infected my dreams
Review: I read Time's Arrow in the middle of a Martin Amis marathon that all started with London Fields. I'm a huge fan of his writing and while I don't think this matches up with London Fields (in my opinion, few novels can), I really loved this novel. I was so into this book that in the week that I was reading it, I had dreams that my life was in reverse (very disorienting when I'd wake up). In retrospect, the backwards novel as a literary trick is a bit cheap, and using the Holocaust is possibly cheaper, nevertheless, I was absolutely wrapped up in this book. Under another author's hands this may have gone over like a brick, but Amis is a brilliant writer and he executed this trick with a mastery that only an artist of his stature could manage.

Rating:
Summary: Another praise for Sir Amis
Review: Must read. Amis is truly genius in mastering the story as Shakespeare and words as Nabokov. His story telling will disturb your sense of time. The book's last chapter will shock you continuously provoking thoughts. You would finish as another admirer of Sir Amis.

Rating:
Summary: Wordplay, timeplay, and morality... let's go!
Review: oh yeah. this one's a keeper. I read this third in my list of M Amis books, at the time living in Wash DC and commuting by walking & subway. I would read while walking -- wouldn't you think that disorienting, what with time moving backward and all that? well it wasn't, it was so very fascinating that I almost started walking backward as some tribute to the plot device.

The very fact that the protagonist's name is Tod T Friendly should tell you bunches about M Amis. First you have to know that the word "tod" is German for "death." From there you extrapolate that the middle "T" likely stands for "the" and you find his name means "friendly death." Keep this in mind as you unravel Tod's life.

as always, Martin Amis has out-clevered the mass of folks who crack his books and run their eyes over the pages. the synaptic misfires causing some to not or mis-understand this book is *NOT* a fault of the book or its author... it's the reader who's fallen short of the task of understanding M Amis's take on the various historical and cultural events and trends documented in this fine reverse-frame flicker.

Rating:
Summary: Mart Looks Back
Review: This is an ingenious book with an ample supply of Mart's usual brilliant writing. In general, this brilliance captures the odd and surprising effects of experiencing life in reverse-people leaving a hospital battered and broken or food leaving the mouth to fill a plate. At the same time, this reversal of time produces a dreamlike quality in the narrative, with the usual cumulative effects of a well-told novel dissipating, not building, as the story progresses. I'm glad I read this book. But I think "Time's Arrow" demonstrates why most novels (I'm not sure about science fiction) move into the narrative's future. This risky book is provocative reading. Still, I prefer "The Information", when Gywn Barry is plotting and enacting his revenge on the futile Richard Tull.

Rating:
Summary: An insightful & sometimes disturbing view of the holocaust
Review: What better way to gain insight into something than by viewing it inside out, or backwards. In Times Arrow we follow the life of a concentration camp doctor in reverse. Instead of committing mass murder, he is bringing hundreds of people to life. Instead of stripping them naked, they are providing clothing to suffering people. By viewing the holocaust in such a manner Amis shows that it makes more sense when viewed backwards instead of forwards

Although the backwards conversations were confusing at first, I found that I grew used to them and even found many of them somewhat amusing.

Rating:
Summary: Martin Amis'
Review: What if the order of time is nothing more than human perception? In Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," a theory is proposed that the individual moments in life are the essential components of existence, no matter what order those events take place. At one point, the protagonist, Billy, perceives a war film in reverse: Instead of building bombs, the factory workers in the film dissemble their weapons. They are bringers of peace, not war.

Martin Amis expertly weaves this concept throughout a serpentine plot in "Time's Arrow," where the world runs in reverse to everything we've ever known. Humans are born from the grave, growing younger and younger until they begin an intense platonic relationship with a woman who eventually becomes their only love, their mother, whose breasts they will suckle for countless hours; until the day they enact the most intimate act imaginable, merging with their caretaker. In the end, their father will use sex to rip the last spark of their existence in two, stealing their life energy for himself.Amis ups the ante by spinning his story around a Nazi-era doctor. In this world, physicians bring corpses to life, insert cancer into healthy patients, and break perfect bones. And the Nazis aren't burning Jews: They're creating them-by the millions.

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