Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, is the life story of a Nazi doctor who worked at Auschwitz, the setting for the climax of the novel, then escaped justice and hid in America. This Holocaust novel is Martin Amis’s exploration of ‘The Nature of the Offence’, a phrase he borrowed from Jewish Italian writer, Auschwitz survivor and eventual suicide Primo Levi and which Amis uses as a subtitle for his book. Tod Friendly, later John Young, briefly Hamilton de Souza and finally Odilo Unverdorben, (unverdorben meaning uncorrupted in German) is the main character whose conscience, or soul, narrates the story backwards in time from Tod’s death (Tod being German for ‘death’) in America, through to the climactic, appalling events of Auschwitz and Schloss Hartheim (a hospital for the disabled in Austria) and on to his extreme youth. The novel has a single plot, no sub-plots, and aside from Tod/Odilo and the narrator only minor characters who make fleeting appearances in the story and scarcely seem to interact with the central figure, such is his isolation from others.
The two structural devices of a narrator who is a fallible ‘passenger or parasite’ and the reversal of time enable Amis to examine the nature of the Holocaust in an original, powerful and poetic way that shocks us anew by portraying the extraordinarily immoral, unconscionable events of that most infamous period in human history through the imperfect understanding of the narrator. Time being reversed, the vile doctors at Auschwitz become glorious creators: ‘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 is the reversal of time that enables Amis to damn the medical perpetrators of the Holocaust with such eloquence, as all life’s events are defamiliarised and rendered nonsensical, save those that are demented in real time.
The narrator intuits that he and Tod are ‘starting out on a terrible journey...