Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

Discussion on Zoom, 7th January 2021 – all present.

Richard, whose choice this was, had never read a Martin Amis and had wanted to for a long time. Although he’d heard the titles of many of Amis’s books – London Fields, Money, the Rachel Papers - he chose this one as he is very interested in time and books on time.

Overall opinion

Most of the BBBC were looking forward to reading this – some had read other Amis books and has been impressed with them; others had not but had wished to. And most knew that the reviews of Times’ Arrow had been ‘extravagant in their praise’. Rose Tremain said: "Time's Arrow turns the bored, banjaxed, broken-hearted old reader into a breathless, bedazzled young reader for whom the novel becomes once again a source of illumination and an act of hope." James Wood described the book as "a stunning achievement, perilous and daring". It was even nominated for the Booker prize.

But there has rarely been a BBBC book which was so disliked or by which people were so unimpressed, and there has never been a book which was so unexpectedly disliked (out of the 187 books read so far since May 2005, the only books to score lower than this book were a very bad Robert Ludlum and an equally bad Victoria Hislop! Many did not expect to like either of those and therefore were not disappointed; whereas people DID expect this to be good, so the disappointment was all the greater. For example, MarkT reported that he had been looking forward to reading another Amis, as the Rachel Papers was one of his youthful greats, and he has read it many times.)

In sum, overall opinions were that:

• it was a slight, trivial, and fundamentally boring book (R);
• arduous, gimmicky, irritating and gruelling. This was a contrived structure to challenge the writing skills of Amis rather than do anything useful for the reader. Pandering to his conceit (ChW);
• Overall, I could not find any point to this book, other than an intellectual exercise for the author (W);
• I felt I was reading a jumble of words – therefore unintelligible and irritating – a dreadful waste of paper (J);
• The main character is an uninspiring and immoral person who seems just swept along by events, including loveless childhood, a failed marriage, medical duties in concentration camps and then escape to the US and a series of jobs at a hospital and a voracious sex life and failed relationships, including with the desperate sounding Irene. Is there a point to the book part from the reversal challenge: maintaining a story and characters in reverse time order? (ChB)

One or two opinions were not so wholeheartedly negative:

• Weighty, serious themes of domestic abuse and violence, torture, murder and genocide (given an odd perspective through being reversed); and humorous at times, mostly because of the inversion of events. Overall, a brilliant idea with some great imagination and some nice sentences, but neither an easy read nor an enjoyable experience, and although there was enough to make me interested to read a novel of his not written backwards, it didn’t endear me to the author (A). 
• I like an experimental art form, one where the artist tries to push the boundaries of their art form. Like being taken on a journey without knowing where it is going. It was unsuccessful, but one should respect the attempt (S).

There were four main areas to the discussion: the topic, the reversal of time, the style and the experimental nature of the book.

1. The topic

There was again a clear consensus that “As the story of the Holocaust, concentration camps and medical experiments was well known to me and generally all readers (one would assume) there was no surprise in anything that came through the story because we knew from the outset what Amis was going to be writing about.” (ChW)

 

There are two elements here.

First, did Amis have anything new to say about the Holocaust? Again the consensus was not: 

• “Does this add to our understanding of the Holocaust or of immigrants to the US? I feel not.” (ChB) 
• “I do not feel that this book has anything to offer or to add about those awful events. I got no new perspective, no new knowledge, about the Holocaust – although some of the descriptions were very distressing, about removing “Clothes, spectacles, hair (“Freightcars full of it. Freightcar after freightcar.”), teeth” and the gold fillings, which the main character then used to live off for the rest of his life. And the awful ways that people were killed - not just the gas chambers or the vans full of exhaust fumes or the shootings - for example “Enlightenment was urged on me the day I saw the old Jew float to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire. Then they put his beard back on.” And somehow the time-going-backwards element and the jaunty way that he wrote about this death made it even worse. And for me, there were no new perspectives on the fact that some awful characters did escape justice and lived full lives under new names – although I do know that many more escaped to South America then did to the Northern continent. ” (R)

Second, maybe it was simply the wrong topic for the book:

• “Maybe if the story had been one which had dealt with a completely unknown subject it might have been more interesting and compelling for the reader to work with the book. Instead I nearly gave up twice.” (ChW)

Again, some were (slightly) less damning:

• “Perhaps the reversal of the obscenity done to the Jews does bring it home again, ensure we respond with horror, anger and grief at what was done.” (ChB)

2. The time-flowing-backwards

A number of people liked this IDEA: 

• “great idea of a life in reverse, reverse chronology, including the narrative, dialogue and explanations” (A)

Andrew thought that the execution of the idea also created some interesting juxtapositions:

• his terrible crimes against people and his abusive treatment of Herta made almost matter of fact by being told in reverse eg. as he brings people back to life and reunites them with family
• which for me heightened the impact of the atrocities as it made me think about them more while trying to make sense of the narrative – though at the same time the author risks being highly offensive.

Although others disagreed:

• “While, the reverse actions of the death camp did have the effect of presenting the horrors in an even more horrifying way, we already know what happened there.” (W)

There were other positive things for some: although “it was not easy to read as I needed to spend time reversing the dialogue and narrative to check what is/was happening, but fascinating with every event in reverse - eg.

• shopping, having a meal, washing up,
• damaging and mending things,
• · babies being born,
• buying presents for people
• restrictions getting less and less for Jews,
• having a dump,
• performing an operation – putting on messy bloodstained scrubs and taking bloody swabs out of the bin after suturing the skin

And some of these reversals provide some amusement:” 

• “Rounding it off with a cocktail, we finish our meal and sit there doggedly describing it to the waiter, with the menus there to jog our memory.”
• “One of her duties is to replenish Hamilton’s chamber pot each morning.”
• “Something ails the ship’s engines. How they cough and choke and retch. The smoke that feeds our funnels is much too thick and black.”

And ChrisB agreed: 

“the reversal provided some funny, almost slapstick moments with reverse bodily functions, reverse medical procedures.”
And a number of people thought that there were times, using this idea, when the writing provided a pause for thought, and a deeper underlining of some important ideas, for example: 

• “On the ramp he cut a frankly glamorous figure, where he moved like a series of elegant decisions."
• “Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring.”
• “Human beings want to be alive. They are dying to be alive.”

Nevertheless, the overall consensus was that this was a gimmick, and that it did not work, certainly over the length of even a short book:

• “Why was it necessary for the book to be written backwards. In the epilogue to the book it says that Amis decided to write a book backwards and having played tennis with a friend one day who gave him a book about the “Nazi doctors“ he decided that this would be the subject of his reverse book. No explanation why he felt it was necessary to write the book backwards or what he felt it would achieve. PLUS I also felt that the details given were too shocking to be played with in this reverse manner.” (ChrisW).
• “Generally, I found the reversal of time a distraction from the story though there were lots of clever descriptions. Taking on reverse medical procedures and processes or love scenes, for example was a challenge, handled well. I am not sure it always worked consistently and there is an inherent conflict between a flowing narrative going forwards with the action going backwards. The text goes forward but we are to believe that all speech and movement were backwards.” (ChrisB) “The reverse time seemed interesting to me for the first few pages (and as I say, very occasionally that element reinforced a point in the writing), but very quickly it became nothing more than a gimmick. It was a gimmick that he tried and generally succeeded in maintaining, but one where there were huge holes in the concept – after all, people still TALKED forwards, and hence although each paragraph or event went backwards, all of the words and all of the sentences still moved forwards, and there were other holes in the concept as well. So – it is clever, in its way, but for me, completely ‘so what’. Amis has nothing to add about time to the many very interesting books, both fact and fiction, that have been written about our experience of time.” (R)

3. Style

There were some positive aspects to Amis’s style.

• “The narrator was an interesting concept – his conscience? If so surely Amis missed the opportunity for the conscience to have a more moral view on the activities of the doctor and to express these when instead all the conscience did was crack jokes and repeatedly refer to the inability to quite understand what was going on because everything was being recounted backwards.! Too long. Didn’t gain anything from this book.” (ChrisW)
• “The first few pages were interesting, but as I read on interest began to wane. There were a few cleverly constructed, quotable, descriptive sentences!” (W)

And ChrisB provided a few examples of these: “Some nice observations about relationships”:

• “I have noticed in the past, of course, 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.”.

“A nice description of desperation and anger”:

• “Tod’s hidden mind insists, in dream form, that Tod feels pain. The dreams tell us this in their miserable iteration. And fear. Tod is a big depositor in the bank where fear is kept. Around midnight, sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair. With one fierce and skilful kick of his aching foot he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator’s flank. With a butt of his head, he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror, heal also the worsening welt in his own tarnished brow, and then stand there staring at himself with his eyes flickering.”

“Observations on life”:

• “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.”  

“And suicide”:

• “But you can’t end yourself, not here. I am familiar with the idea of suicide. But once life is running, you can’t end it. You’re not at liberty to do that. We’re all here for the duration. Life will end. I know exactly how long I’ve got. It looks like for ever. I feel unique and eternal. Immortality consumes me – and me only.”

“And sexual frustration”:

• “Herta’s nightdress is childish. It is patterned with genies and sprites. I begged of them, these sprites and genies. Deliriously, all night, in bed, I begged – oh, the bedbug of nightbeg …”

And some ChrisB just liked:

• “It was November. The humans had grown their winter coats, and the high buildings trembled in the tight grip of their stress equations.”
• “Europe churned in the night like the seas of human forms round the stoves of station waiting rooms.”

Andrew thought that “Herta – sounds like hurt her” which was very apposite about the wife of this man. 

 

And even Richard, who scored the book the lowest, found some positives: “I do think that generally Amis writes well, and initially there was quite a lot to like. On page 1 I thought he made a lovely start: “I sensed their vigour, scarcely held in check, like the profusion of their body hair”. I also thought the idea of him being solely an observer of this person, who was not him, was potentially interesting. And I liked this observer’s grammatical pedantry – very like me – for example, also early on, he is taken aback by people’s lack of observance of grammatical rules: “The apostrophe in ‘Please Respect Owner’s Rights’ isn’t where it ought to be. (Nor is the one on the placard on Route 6 which locates and praises ‘Rogers’ Liquor Locker’.)” And there was some nice writing in relation to the ‘time-flowing-backwards’ gimmick – “A child’s breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of the father’s hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife’s blade”.  

 

And yet, almost everyone agreed that these positives could not outweigh the general negatives, and even the occasional humour from the reversal of time palled. As Richard put it, “by the time I had got only a few more ages in, I had written to myself “I’m getting tired of this gimmick” for example when he wrote “The little children on the street, they get littler and littler. At some point it is thought necessary to confine them to pushchairs, later to backpacks. Or they are held in the arms and quietly soothed – of course they’re sad to be going. In the very last months they cry more than ever. And they no longer smile.” And Andrew was especially scathing over Amis’s “disappointingly sloppy dog’s breakfast when Amis shows off to the reader his grasp of clinical examination”

• “Auscultation would reveal dyspnoea, rich in rales, also tachypnoea, suggesting mediastinal crunch. Eyes show strabismus and nystagmus, also arteriovenous nicking and silver-wiring. In the mouth the buccal muscosa (sic) are lesioned, the oropharynx inflamed.”

As Andrew put it, “lazy writing, full of inaccuracies and errors - and irritating”.

4. The IDEA – Experimental fiction

Andrew thought the idea of a book “narrated by a sort of conscience of the protagonist who is constantly baffled and misinterprets the reversed events and situations” was interesting, as did Willm: “The narrator being intrinsically part of while being consciously separated from the protagonist Tod was an interesting idea: I have at times found a part of myself observing what I have done and wondering why I did it”. And Steve was “struck by MarkW’s reference to Jazz – the book reminded me of Jazz – an art form that I don’t like especially, but one where I can recognise the artists’ skill, and the fact that s/he / they are trying to do something NEW. I like an experimental art form, one where the artist tries to push the boundaries of their art form. I like being taken on a journey without knowing where it is going. Therefore I liked bits – which were often amusing – for the first 20 pages!”

But again here, most felt that the book failed:

• “However, the narrator seemed to be simply a passenger, and the role was not developed, either as a ‘conscience’ or a ‘soul’ (whatever this could be)” (W).
• “It was inconsistent, with a narrator who sometimes was the observer, sometimes speaking for the man himself” (S)
• John “Felt sorry for the dedicatee – the authors sister” and “did not think this book a “valiant effort” or “interesting experiment” - more a conceit, an indulgence by a “too clever by half” author – a sad reflection on Amis as I have enjoyed some of his other work such as London Field or Night Train. Understood what the author trying to achieve but it didn’t work – therefore a failure of a book”.
• And ChrisB thought that “although the premise of a soul experiencing a person’s life backwards was intriguing, it felt at times as if the author was more concerned with the technicalities of this than the story.”

As MW put it: “I like books where one forgets that it is a book at all – here it was hard work – here the technique was ALL.”

Conclusion

So fundamentally, most found the book boring, a technical exercise, a failure - maybe a clever book, but as Richard said at the outset, a slight, trivial, and fundamentally so boring book. ChrisB asked “Really what the book is about? I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.”

Richard Velleman

January 2021