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Time's Arrow

3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 · rating details · 5,478 ratings · 474 reviews

Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that's fundamentally unspeakable? Amis' solution is a deft literary conceit of narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the person of one man, ex-Nazi doctor Tod T. Friendly. One identity wakes at the moment of Friendly's death...more

Hardcover, 168 pages

Published October 23rd 1991 by Harmony (first published 1991)

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Dec 21, 2011 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: backwards-minded types

Shelves: crime-and-punishment, here-is-new-york, kind-of-depressing

She can't help it if her best isn't very good, but she's done it. She's ploddingly typed out her half-assedly apropos review, then clicked on the stars -- three of them, yellow and cartoony, her blithe summation of an author's painstakingly wrought offering to twentieth-century literature. He'll probably spend years writing then researching this thing, which she's already rated like it's an eBay-seller transaction, and reviewed with all the thoughtfulness and care of an Adderall-snorting thirtee...more She can't help it if her best isn't very good, but she's done it. She's ploddingly typed out her half-assedly apropos review, then clicked on the stars -- three of them, yellow and cartoony, her blithe summation of an author's painstakingly wrought offering to twentieth-century literature. He'll probably spend years writing then researching this thing, which she's already rated like it's an eBay-seller transaction, and reviewed with all the thoughtfulness and care of an Adderall-snorting thirteen-year-old's Facebook status update...

In any case, now she'll see what this book's all about. She picks it up, name-scans the Afterword (Aw, Hitch!), and begins. Seems to be a fairly standard-sort bildungsroman kind of thing, young boy into man... oh, no, but wait. It's not really -- some heavy stuff here -- and -- uh oh, what's this? -- an arguably silly postmodern TRICK! She likes it well enough, reads the whole thing through in about a day. This author does seem to have got a certain way with words, some nice little descriptive details: "Mickey Mouse sniggers and Greta Garbo averts her pained gaze from [a young couple's] mortified writhings on the shallow fur of cinema seats" (p. 154). Shallow fur! She likes that... Also some nice, darkly-brooding well-phrased stuff with its own intense, seductive style: "There's probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I'm tired of being human, if human is what I am. I'm tired of being human" (p. 93). Ooh, that's nice!

More good stuff -- time passes from one era to the next with description that transcends mere gimmick... because gimmick is what this is, she sees, as she nears the first page. In this book, she discovers, time runs in reverse, and the life of the main character is being chronicled from the end backwards by a rather hapless, baffled narrator whom we're encouraged to picture as "a sentimentalized fetus, with faithful smile" (p. 42).

Does it work? It works. She more or less does get pretty into the whole thing. But then, she's prone to jokes that go on way too long, and tends to find them more amusing in the endless retelling: an old man wearing bellbottoms in the early eighties is fashion's cutting edge, garbage men scatter trash throughout cities, while highway workers rip up the road. Of course, she knows, this is Literature, so sometimes the joke is very Serious: its protagonist is a doctor, who appalls his Jiminy Cricket-type observing ego by brutalizing patients, as doctors in this backwards world (almost) always necessarily do. The narrator speculates on the demolition of cities, centuries from now, into "the pleasant land -- green, promised," and pauses to assert that he's glad he wasn't around for the city's creation. It's poignant, while also cool, as she finds this novel has generally been throughout.

By the time she's done, she's resolved to seek out more of the writer's work. Although this isn't the greatest book she's ever read, she enjoyed it, and she bets he's done better elsewhere with this evident cleverness and his linguistic gifts. She adds Time's Arrow to her to-read list, and reviews another book by Amis -- book reviews, The War Against Cliche -- which, when she reads it, she feels is vastly superior. Then she goes on to sample more of his fiction, and finds it sort of beguilingly uneven. As with Time's Arrow, each book has, to varying degrees, both its awe-inspiring strengths and unforgivable flaws. None of what she reads is, in her opinion, as good as his reviews... until she finally comes across London Fields, and is lovestruck: THIS is the Martin Amis novel she's been waiting for all her life!

And why is the thing you're looking for always in the last place you look? It seems like she would read more Amis after loving London Fields so much, but she doesn't, and acts surprised later when a close female friend recommends his work. In fact, she seems to forget any real sense of who Amis is, and is overheard sharing a vague negative impression -- acquired who knows where -- that "only pretentious, asshole guys who are way too into coke and themselves read him."

Which is too bad, because Martin Amis is a really good writer, and he's written a lot of books, and she might really enjoy some if she gave them a chance. But it's too late. Wait, is it too late? It might be too late, or, alternatively, it might not be... To be honest, she's not sure how this whole thing works, and trying to figure out the logistics sort of makes her head hurt.(less)

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Aug 13, 2011 Lorenzo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british

I read this book while I was living in Oslo on 2005.
Then, for some reason I forgot to add it to my booklist.

It might have been amnesia.
After all in those five months I spent in old Christiania my attention was diverted by many things. I recall the London bombings, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the Norwegian parliamentary elections, the Indonesian national day, my struggle with bokmaal pronounciation and two or three juvenile infatuations with unaware girls.

Well, no surprises those ladies...more

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Feb 06, 2011 Jen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: exacto-knives-are-nice-and-shiny, lit-fic, silver-shelf

English Standard Version (©2001)
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

“What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember.”
-Time’s Arrow

This is what I want to remember: that I bought this off a wheeled cart for two quarters. That in a bad economy, this was a great investment. Amis is genius in this book. Pure genius. His structure starts with the last rattling...more English Standard Version (©2001)
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

“What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember.”
-Time’s Arrow

This is what I want to remember: that I bought this off a wheeled cart for two quarters. That in a bad economy, this was a great investment. Amis is genius in this book. Pure genius. His structure starts with the last rattling gasp of life and then pulls the reader backward, reanimating a character’s troubled past by making it the future of the narrative.
I knew going into this book that it was about the holocaust. What I did not know was that the holocaust could still move me, shock me, and brutalize me anymore. I had read too many books on it, seen too many movies and documentaries about it. I became stupid and calloused and let this lull me into thinking that the holocaust had been overdone. Overdone (!) as in boilerplate, as in Hollywood and botox. Thankfully, this book shamed me back into grief.
Reading this book and trying to get a grasp on the main character is a little like trying to figure out what your face really looks like by only using the side of a spoon for a mirror. The narrator is hard to figure out; it may be the broken and detached voice of the main character’s conscience or it may not. Either way, the narrator is confused. Everything is off. Reality is blurred and warped. Things are born from fire instead of read and then burned, tumors are strategically buried inside bodies and not removed, color televisions are traded in for black and white ones. The all-seeing eye that moves with Doctor Tod (“Death”) Friendly is on perpetual rewind and rarely sees things clearly. “But wait a minute. The baby is crawling, only one or two panting inches at a time- but crawling forward. Hey! Christ, how long has it been since I…? Anyhow, it’s soon over, this lucid interval. The mother is reading backward again, and the baby is merely weeping. It wants its diaper filled with new shit from the trash. I’m being immature. I’ve got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever.” By using this approach, Amis is able to make sudden and profound statements on life, man, and society, and he is able to keep the time period and setting from completely overwhelming the story.
Most readers know to expect violence in a story involving the Holocaust, and expectations are fulfilled here in the most striking manner. What is surprising about Time’s Arrow is where the violence fails to occur. Going counterclockwise in this story means reading passages where upholding the Hippocratic Oath is detestable and where injecting victims with acid or delivering Zyklon B is portrayed as almost a heartwarming gesture. “We’d just totaled a couple of teenage boys. Their mothers has brought them in and then got the hell out soon after we’d started work, staying only to witness the methodical unraveling of the soaked bandages. We took the stitches out and swabbed the boys with blood. I remember Witney’s skillful insertion of some kind of crossbow bolt; me, I was wedging shards of brown glass into the other boys’ crown. And we both, as they say, ‘cracked up.’ We laughed at each other, full face, showing at last with teeth and tongue and tonsils the mortal hilarity that sniggers behind everything we do here. Our laughter, together with the boys’ cries and whimpers…”
Instead of breaking up families coming off the trains at Treblinka, the doctor plays matchmaker. How kind the good Nazi doctor is when he takes his own gold and fills the Jews’ teeth. The author creates a revisionist history here, winking at the reader, while the reader nods, smiles, and takes away a fuller knowledge of the truth.
The whole thing is amazing, really. It takes a master craftsman to construct a place where “time’s arrow moves the other way.” The phrase “Life is best understood backwards” takes on depth here, and the author is thorough, linking the book’s title with the clocks at Treblinka, there “…to reassure the Jews- the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, and the Bialystok districts whom the camp had serviced…every station, every journey, needs a clock. The hands were painted and would never move to an earlier time. Beneath the clock was an enormous arrow, on which was printed: ‘Change Here For Eastern Trains.’ But time had no arrow, not here.” Brutal, the forethought of that painted clock. And there, right there, the author makes a winning case for the suspension of time’s correct movement throughout his work. Time is gone here, in this book, because time was suspended and removed during that ugly period in history as well.
This book is dark. Hope does not spring eternal here, but instead gives into the dark side, staring into the bleak void of a starved and hollowed eyed nihilism. It is disturbing, really, to read Amis’ words from a narrator that is like “a baby taken from the toilet,” having a heart but no face: “We cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life while the doctor watches.” If human beings remember only what they want to, I want to remember this book, if only to keep me from forgetting to tremble at the horrors of history.
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Jan 21, 2008 Beverly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: People who don't care for Martin Amis's other books

It continues to amaze me how those who claim to be fans of Martin Amis haven't heard of or read Time's Arrow. This book is a masterpiece in experimental fiction. He literally, methodically, writes the story backwards as his character experiences time going backwards. I don't know of any other author who has attempted and succeeded in doing this. It's been a while since I read it, but what I remember was the uncanny sense that I was experiencing time backwards as I read it. I began questioning wh...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Cecily rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: miscellaneous-fiction, overrated

A short book that is one long gimmick: clever as a writing exercise, but not worth publishing or reading. Once the novelty of a backwards story has worn off, there is little point to it and I lost interest (though I did finish it).

It opens with painfully vivid descriptions of a life-and death emergency. It turns out to be the story of one man's life, told backwards by a consciousness/conscience inhabiting his body, but with no memory of what is to come (i.e. what has already happened). It feels...more A short book that is one long gimmick: clever as a writing exercise, but not worth publishing or reading. Once the novelty of a backwards story has worn off, there is little point to it and I lost interest (though I did finish it).

It opens with painfully vivid descriptions of a life-and death emergency. It turns out to be the story of one man's life, told backwards by a consciousness/conscience inhabiting his body, but with no memory of what is to come (i.e. what has already happened). It feels his emotions, but can't control them or his actions. He is a doctor, so in this world, he assaults people, "money... all comes down to the quality of your trash" and "all sustenance, all meaning" comes from the loo!

At one point the narrator says "I have noticed... that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backwards. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked - and still get no further forward." There are duly several scenes where it is quite intriguing to read the dialog forwards then backwards, and the fact it works is clever, but... so what?

I can't work out if it would be better or worse as a film: backwards footage of walking and eating is passé, but some other things would work well, e.g. "The ship's route is clearly delineated on the surface of the water and is violently consumed by our advance. Thus we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we were covering our tracks."

There are some other ideas where running them backwards gives an intriguing or awkwardly funny slant, but they don't add up to a decent novel, and some of them are so gratuitous and irrelevant to the plot (e.g. buying teeth from the tooth fairy) that I can't help thinking Amis had a list of backward things he wanted to incorporate. The slightly more interesting ones include the "meticulous vandalism" of gardening and "uglify the home" instead of DIY, birth being a long, painful goodbye, "a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife's blade", hippies going to Vietnam and returning sane, middle age resurgence of interest in sex being like puberty, breaking up reading like a slushy reconciliation, and bottling the gook from one's hair and selling it. But ultimately, they're a series of gimmicks.

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May 19, 2007 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I can't say enough about this novel, though a quick glance at my friends' reviews reveals that they liked it but were not quite as blown away by it. I loved how Amis took a conceit (running the world backwards and witnessing it from a naive viewpoint that must make sense of backwards-living) and used it to make new something that had grown shopworn and overfamiliar: Literature about the Holocaust. The novel is howlingly funny, and just when you want it to gain in seriousness and gravity, it does...more

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Sep 07, 2011 Chris rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

After reading the first page of this book and realising that Amis was actually going to write a novel with time moving backwards I thought he must have some brilliant notion that required and would more than excuse the use of such an gimmicky device. I was willing to overlook all the technical and conceptual failings and inconsistencies in execution, on grounds of artistic licence, with the faith that the payoff would be so clever, insightful and illuminating theses trivial concerns would pale i...more

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Mar 20, 2008 George rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The premise of this book is well-recorded in earlier reviews: We start with the death of a doctor named Tod Friendly, and then move backwards through his life (much life hitting the Rewind button on a VCR while the tape was still playing). In reverse, the doctors take healthy patients and leave them sick and injured, while love affairs begin with arguments and end with shy flirtation. The key here is the defining period of Tod's life, towards which we are carried, our suspicions growing along th...more

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Jul 31, 2007 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a truly unique story. It starts at death and runs backwards through birth, but even that has a twist. The narrator of the story is a separate voice inside the main character, who is unaware of this omnipresent observer. The voice is impotent and incapable of controlling the body or thoughts of the main character in anyway, it can't even alert the main character to its presence, but yet it persists as an watcher who does not realize the world is running backwards. It just thinks that life ma...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Jonfaith rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had to drop a star. Bruised sleep revealed that I should not uphold my immediate image and adjust downwards. This situation was vivid in that I couldn't stop imaganing Amis in a smoking jacket writing about the Final Solution.

- Anyway -

A novel, a theme, that requires one to pass over it in silence. Marty refers to the Shoah as an autobahn to the reptilian mind. I tend to agree. Reading the dialogue in reverse was afeat. Language, sentences rather, are often so pailindromic.

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Apr 08, 2012 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Martin Amis is a genius. This is a brilliant, unique book. You may say, ‘oh this is just American hyperbole’. Which may appear doubly inappropriate when applied to a British author - an author of whom the British might bestow the moniker ‘good’, or dare I say it, ‘very good’. I jest, this book was nominated for the Booker Award. The Brits love this guy, and rightly so.

I would rank this book as one of the top ten books I have read. I would love to discuss it, but I think it would be a shame to di...more

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Mar 31, 2013 Shane Eide rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

www.emergenthermit.com

"Well, what seems to be the problem?" Tod Friendly’s doctor says to him at the end of the conversation. This is after an entire dialogue that takes place backwards.

And this is the most immediate example of the alternate physics that occur throughout Time’s Arrow. The book follows the observations of a bisected consciousness living inside of the main character, only this other consciousness experiences his entire life in reverse. Like a child, this consciousness is entirely...more

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Mar 31, 2013 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've just finished this fascinating novel. Not only is this book quite powerful but the nature of the story unfolds in a very
cinematic style. The story is about a doctor who has come from overseas after WWII and lives with a terrible secret about his past, and is told by a doppelgänger who lives inside him, witnessing his life unable to act but
only commenting on what unfolds before him. What is most fascinating is that the doppelganger experiences the doctor's life backwards. Meals fly out of mo...more

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Mar 26, 2013 Vanessa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Absurdly clever execution of a very difficult concept, and some very funny and poignant moments because of it. The premise is that our first-person narrator is a conscious but otherwise helpless presence living inside a man and experiencing his entire life moving backwards, and understanding the entire world in terms of reversed cause and effect. And it is amazingly well done. And an incredibly sad lens through which to observe love affairs and hospitals and wars and aging and EVERYTHING. I will...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: vonnegut fans

Recommended to Matt by: village books

Linear time is such a popular concept that we take it for granted. We are always looking ahead and anticipating "what happens next". Watch the clock, and it moves forward.

Time moves in one direction with certainty, and we are its unwilling passengers.

What can be forgotten is that "what happens next" is an unfurling of what has happened before, and before that, and before that. From birth, we (knowingly and otherwise) set into motion a series of interdependent events by our choices, actions, and...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Orsodimondo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: inglese

BE KIND, REWIND
Se io leggessi “Finnegan’s Wake” col caffè, Proust dal dentista e Herta Müller in bagno, forse avrei trovato questo libro ‘semplice’ - e magari anche 'immediato' e 'diretto'.
Così non è e così non è stato: è un’opera che m’è sembrata ostica, molto faticosa da portare avanti e sono contento d’essermene liberato.
Forse non sarei neppure arrivato in fondo, se dopo qualche pagina non avessi avuto l’illuminazione di saltare alla postfazione dove la citazione di Primo Levi ha acceso il mi...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Liam Day rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis is not a normal book. It's a story about an old man with a horrible secret that haunts him in his dreams, which may seem normal enough, except for one thing- as the book goes on, the man gets younger. The events in this book go in the reverse order of what we think of as normal time. I can't say much here without giving away some major plot points, but I will say this: there are several unexpected twists. I liked this book because, while confusing, the story has an in...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Fredrik Garmannslund rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Hvis du har sett filmen Being John Malkovitch (personer kommer inn i hodet på mannen og kan se og høre gjennom hans hode som passive observatører), så kan du se for deg en person som følger en annen gjennom hele livet. Han har tilgang på følelsene til personen, men ikke tankene hans. Tingen er at observatøren som deler opplevelsene til personen opplever alt baklengs og historien begynner på dødsleiet. Begrepet Time´s Arrow referer til det i fysikken om at selv om alle fysiske hendelser like godt...more

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May 23, 2012 Jesse K rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2012

This is the first book that Amis wrote that was not as good as his previous book; I can see where it could be off-putting; much like Other People, which was about someone with no previous memories, it relied on a clever conceit; like all of his previous books, it was rather ugly; it may have been better as a novella or novelette; and anyone starting with Amis, who doesn't plan to read everything by him, like I am doing, in sequential order, should start with Money. To be more concise, I mean to...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001-books-you-must-read

Very cleverly written novel telling the story of a Holocaust doctor's life going backward from his death to his birth. At first, I found the narrative to be very disconcerting. Dialogue and events were all written in reverse chronological order. The doctor's experiences after the war seem as if he is harming the patients while the atrocities committed during the war at the death camps read as if he is raising the dead and helping the Jews go to their original lives. For example on page 76 while...more

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May 11, 2011 Allycks rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Normally when I sense that a writer is going to pull a stunt with the entire conceit of his or her novel, I end up with a slow disdainful Billy Idol-style grimace developing on my face before thudding against the glass ceiling of disgust and shutting the book for good.

Don't do it, Martin. You don't have to dazzle us with a technical feat like this. You're too good for that. And it's called "trying too hard..."

Still, Martin must've been kicking around novel ideas when, probably a little buzzed, g...more

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Apr 12, 2011 Casey J. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. While I have often times been assigned books to read as part of my higher education, it is seldom I get the opportunity to read a book I would truthfully enjoy reading, For many years it has been the same: the Greeks, the Bard, and possibly some work of historical fiction. While I do enjoy the Classics, my spare time reading often entails more fantastical fare, like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, or one of my recent favorites the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. I believe that's wh...more While I have often times been assigned books to read as part of my higher education, it is seldom I get the opportunity to read a book I would truthfully enjoy reading, For many years it has been the same: the Greeks, the Bard, and possibly some work of historical fiction. While I do enjoy the Classics, my spare time reading often entails more fantastical fare, like Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, or one of my recent favorites the First Law series by Joe Abercrombie. I believe that's why I have so far enjoyed my semester's English course. With books like Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and this review's selection, Time's Arrow, I feel my quotient of fantasy is being filled.

Time's Arrow is the story of a doctor named Tod T. Friendly, or should I say John Young, or rather Hamilton de Souza, or even Odilo Unverforben. You see, the main character changes his name often, trying to flee the horrible events of his past - except it isn't his past he tries to forget, it's his future. You see, the entire novel takes place in reverse. He is born through death, and dies at birth. Not just his life, but everything around him, all the people, places, the laws of physics - backwards. This might seem odd, but stranger still is the point of view from which the tale takes place. An unknown person is observing all of this along with the reader, in reverse, but Tod and those around him are experiencing everything correctly. The result is an odd third -and-yet-first person narrative from the somewhat twisted view of a separate entity inhabiting the main character's mind. I thought these were some rather off-the-wall and creative components of an otherwise straightforward work of fiction. Even so, it can at times become annoying or gimmicky; how many times must I be given an example of something backwards being confusing? I can understand the absurdist poignancy of life in reverse , I just felt it was overdone and should have been saved for special occasions, like the scenes where surgery causes ills, romances begin with tumult and end with indifferent meetings, or the very important concentration camp scenes.

Oh, did I not mention? This book is primarily about Nazis, or rather one Nazi, the illustrious Mr. Friendly himself. He wasn't always a Nazi of course; he began life (at least from the narrator's point of view) as an elderly American doctor, but before long his life is uprooted by youth, a name change, traveling across the Atlantic, then another identity. The majority of the book was just a prelude to the main event, so to speak. As the life of Tod grows to it's younger days, or rather the narrator's timely demise, the entirety of his sordid past comes to life. Tod, or as previously mentioned, Odilo, was a German youth involved in the Nazi movement. He assisted in the capture of Jews, the execution of the mentally handicapped, and a long term at the infamous Auschwitz camp. After the War ended, he fled to Portugal, then America, where he became a new man. I have come to associate the Nazi with the zombie, or pirate, or mad scientist as an anachronism, an antagonistic plot device, reduced to its current state by overuse.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book (or as pleasant you can be when faced with a mass-genocide). It handles the Holocaust in an entirely new way - the Nazis are the creators of a new race, formed of the earth and brought to life from the great ovens and showers used to kill them. The point of this is not lost on me, the reader; Amis was trying to show the sheer inhumanity of the Nazi's actions during World War II. With this completely innocent perspective of a dweller in another's mind, telling things from his skewed viewpoint, the entire Holocaust becomes an absurdity, and the return to life prior to it shows the human side of the otherwise inhuman Nazis. Though they became evil monsters, destroyers of life, they were all at one time young, children, mother's sons. I enjoy the fresh take on an otherwise overdone genre, and have awarded Mr. Amis, and this book 4 stars. Not 5 because honestly, enough with the backwards thing. I get it.(less)

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Apr 01, 2011 Steve rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A novel with an innovative idea which falters at times in its execution. The concept concerns the life of a man. This life is presented to us by a conscious element of the man which sees the life in reverse. We begin the novel by finding the man has bad dreams which appear to presage something in the "future." We eventually find that these dreams are a result of the man having spent his young manhood as a concentration camp doctor. The conscience, of course, does not understand the horror of the...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Joey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The most interesting thing about this book--Martin Amis' conceit of having time flow backwards for the main character while a disembodied narrator shares the ride--is also its biggest downfall. The often-confused narrator experiences his "host" Tod Friendly's life from the end back to the beginning, coming to life as Tod dies. Once the reader gets acclimated to reading what seems at first to be a rather mundane life-in-reverse, which is by turns poignant and downright scatalogical as the narrato...more The most interesting thing about this book--Martin Amis' conceit of having time flow backwards for the main character while a disembodied narrator shares the ride--is also its biggest downfall. The often-confused narrator experiences his "host" Tod Friendly's life from the end back to the beginning, coming to life as Tod dies. Once the reader gets acclimated to reading what seems at first to be a rather mundane life-in-reverse, which is by turns poignant and downright scatalogical as the narrator describes his "host" Tod Friendly's everyday life, the thrill tends to wear off a little.

Looking at life this way certainly has some merit. The way our narrator experiences relationships, which inevitably begin with a slap or an argument in which all the differences are lain out on the table, is especially interesting. His disdain for Tod's work as a doctor, which he sees as a miserable business involving injuring the unwounded and making the healthy sick, is also engaging. But the big pay off comes in Part II, when the clues the reader has been given along the way--it's clear that Tod has a secret that no one, not even the narrator, knows about, and his dreams about "bomb" babies and human bodies hint at the horrors of his past--are finally revealed.

Yes, Tod T. Friendly, later (or earlier, depending on how you view it)known by several other names until he travels back to his real name, Odilo Unverdorben, was a Nazi doctor stationed at Auschwitz, where he oversaw the everyday workings of genocide before escaping to Italy and finally America where our narrator was born as Tod lay dying. After getting acclimated to Auschwitz, the narrator gets the feeling that "the world is going to start making sense...Now." As he engineers the holocaust in reverse, the narrator muses that "Creation is easy. Also ugly. ... Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race. To make a people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas, with electricity, with shit, with fire."

It's difficult for our minds to comprehend horrors on the scale of the Holocaust. Millions of people were systematically rounded up, imprisoned, and executed. The sheer numbers are appalling, but thinking about how these acts were committed by other human beings, not some sort of monsters, is all but unbearable. Like much of what the narrator has seen while living in Tod Friendly's head, it just doesn't seem to make any sense at all. Amis has attempted with this book to imagine those atrocities in a way that seems to make sense, turning, in effect, slaughter into creation, death back into life. The effect is startling, forcing the reader to think about the gas chambers and the millions of Jews who died in them in a new way. The narrator's joy over Tod's acts of creation is a steady counterpoint to the horror felt by the reader, who of course knows what's really happening.

It's a noble undertaking, and Amis should be praised for the idea. Though the reverse narrative does wear thin and is sometimes too clever for its own good, the scenes in Auschwitz are devastating and make it worthwhile. (less)

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Feb 22, 2011 James Moffett rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Oh. I guess it's over. Well, check that one off.

Wow, very little description of his childhood at all, except for the stereotypical pre-Nazi animal torturing history. And no explanation about why our ghostly narrator is living in his head...

Nice to see him as a young man...

Finally the book is picking up. The descriptions of collecting Jews & Auschwitz are equal parts gripping and horrifying. Now I see why he wrote this book. Too bad I had to wade through half the book to get here...

So, is he...more Oh. I guess it's over. Well, check that one off.

Wow, very little description of his childhood at all, except for the stereotypical pre-Nazi animal torturing history. And no explanation about why our ghostly narrator is living in his head...

Nice to see him as a young man...

Finally the book is picking up. The descriptions of collecting Jews & Auschwitz are equal parts gripping and horrifying. Now I see why he wrote this book. Too bad I had to wade through half the book to get here...

So, is he some kind of Nazi doctor I guess? Okay, things are making sense now. Wow, that was an interesting turn... Didn't know this was going to be a holocaust book. Not sure how I feel about that...

More events in his life that I don't really care about. And his secret past - whatever it is - I guess I'm bound to find out about it soon enough, but I'm finding it hard to care. Half the book I've been waiting to hear what his deep dark secret is. Somehow I think I'm supposed to care more...

I'm sure this book was fun for Amis to write; it has an interesting concept. But I'm not finding it really fun to read. The narrator is funny enough but I really don't care about the main character. And his life feels to me like just a series of events happening after each other. Maybe because of the concept, I feel no drive or motivation pushing the character forward. And please, narrator, stop saying that the world doesn't make sense. You can make all kinds of humourous and poingant observations about life but you don't notice that you're living it backwards? ...

This concept is hurting my head. The dialogue especially is painful. I feel a compulsion to read each bit of dialogue backwards, but it's never really any more interesting backwards than it was forwards. I'm already tired of having to remember what happened so I'll know what's going to happen...

Hm. I'm having a hard time caring about Mr Friendly. The pace that the novel moves at is so fast, it feels sometimes like just a steady stream of events: and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. Where is this book going? Or, where has it been? Not sure how long this concept will stay interesting...

Wow, this time-backwards concept is really cool! The narrator's quirky observations certainly make one think about life in a different way...

Is he living life backwards? How strange. And he's living in someone else's head? Why?...

I've never read anything by Amis before - this book was rated pretty high, so I think I'll give it a shot.(less)

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Dec 20, 2010 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. read this a number of years ago but refound it in a book shop in Novemeber and for some reason decided to read it again. Its extraordinary. Amis tells the story of a nazi war criminal from his death to his birth. Time running backwards with a narrator inside the character's head but detached almost like his conscience but because all is travelling backwards the conscience sees events unfolding from death, horror and tragedy up into peace, calm and safety and reinterprets the brutality and inhuma...more

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Jul 02, 2010 John rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. An entity -- a soul, perhaps? -- is born into the body of naturalized US citizen Tod Friendly at the moment the latter dies of old age, and watches Tod's life lived in reverse, from this moment of death all the way back to the moment, decades earlier, when as a tiny bawling baby he is stuffed back into his screaming mother. Along the way, we discover that Tod, under a different name, is a monster, a WWII war criminal living in the US under an assumed name: he has been one of the vile "physicians...more An entity -- a soul, perhaps? -- is born into the body of naturalized US citizen Tod Friendly at the moment the latter dies of old age, and watches Tod's life lived in reverse, from this moment of death all the way back to the moment, decades earlier, when as a tiny bawling baby he is stuffed back into his screaming mother. Along the way, we discover that Tod, under a different name, is a monster, a WWII war criminal living in the US under an assumed name: he has been one of the vile "physicians" working in Auschwitz under Mengele and, before that, with the Holocaust's major architect Christian Wirth. To the entity, however, these men and "Tod" himself aren't monsters at all but great benefactors, for do they not take shattered, mutilated men, women and children and, marvelously, render them whole?

The telling of a tale in reverse chronology is an interesting literary conceit -- interesting in theory, anyway. In practice, it's a bit annoying and dull, which is why (so far as I know) only one other novel has been written this way: Counter-Clock World (1967) by Philip K. Dick; there may be good reason why this is one of the few Dick novels not to have been reissued over the past decade or so. (After the publication of Time's Arrow, Amis acknowledged borrowing the conceit from Dick; but he makes no mention of this in the book's Acknowledgments pages.) In the case of Time's Arrow, the thrill of seeing everyday actions being reinterpreted because done backwards wears off pretty fast, and once that happens there's not a whole lot left to be entranced by except watching how well or badly the author handles his self-imposed task. To Amis's credit, I noticed just one instance where his control of the chronology slipped (unless I'm mistaking the reference), where the narrating entity referred to something as being in the past when in fact it lay in the entity's future: p42, where the narrator's talking about a Japanese student in 1960s or 1970s America, and says, "He's lucky he wasn't here a few years ago, when we really hated the Japanese."

I read the book around this time of its first publication and remember thinking that, just as the telling of the tale backwards was a somewhat meaningless stunt, so in fact was my reading it: I got to the end of it (it's quite a short book) but felt less as if I'd read a novel or been told a story, more as if I'd got to the far end of the tightrope without falling off, and so what? I had the same feeling this time round except that the book annoyed me quite a lot more -- not just through the affectation of the literary trick but also because applying it to a piece of human history so horrific as the Auschwitz seems to me to cheapen that misery and suffering, as if to say that human torment is just something to be witty about.

Oh, yes, and it wasn't lost on me that "Tod" is the German for "death". Friendly Death. I'm not 100% sure what Amis meant to convey by that.(less)

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May 09, 2010 Jafar rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Not much of a plot, but a really great idea for a novel combined with some great writing. The consciousness of a dying doctor, Tom Friendly, starts living his life backward as soon as he dies. This is not just telling the story of his life backward. Tom’s consciousness experiences his life with time literally reversed. Eating means throwing up food and putting it back on the plate. Constipation is quite a bizarre situation. Tom breaks up with his lovers, then is with them, then seduces them, the...more

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Mar 22, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Funny, yes. Using a "second consciousness," Amis basically has you, the reader, wake up in an old man's head after (or before) he's kicked the bucket working in his garden.

What proceeds (ahem) is a reverse-account of everything that's happened in this guy's life. If you don't read the back of the book, any of these reviews, the wiki page, or any of the like, then we'll keep Tom T. Friendly's secret out of the review.

But what is great about this novel is that it begins with quite a bit of tongue-...more

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Mar 10, 2010 Adrienne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: unreliable-narrator, library, first-person

What an interesting book! It takes place backwards, told by an unreliable (!!) narrator who effectively lives inside the head of the main character (Tod). Even though the narrator is unaware of Tod's thoughts, he still can process sensory information and see some of Tod's dreams. The book begins with Tod's death, and continues backwards in time. This backwards nature of the story makes the interpretation of events very different than what one would normally think: for example, relationships begi...more

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About Martin Amis

Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recog...more

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Quotes from Time's Arrow

“It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay. ” — 27 people liked it

“They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.” — 12 people liked it

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