From Death to Birth
By David Lehman;
TIME'S ARROW
Or, The Nature of the Offense.
By Martin Amis.
168 pp. New
York: Harmony Books. $18.
MY 8-year-old son, an
expert at videocassette recorders, wondered one day, "Why can't we rewind
time?" The question in all its blunt naivete suggests the imaginative
conceit at the heart of Martin Amis's remarkable new novel, "Time's Arrow."
Mr. Amis explores how life would appear, how it would feel and what sense it
would seem to make if it were a film running backward -- if time's arrow were
to reverse its direction and a recording angel, along for the ride, permitted
us to watch history (which Lord Byron called "the devil's scripture")
as it is unwritten, line by line, gesture by gesture, until the perpetrators of
the 20th century vanish into their mothers' wombs.
The vehicle for this
experiment in chronology -- you might call it a fictional deconstruction of
time -- is the backward narration of one man's life. Mr. Amis's protagonist is
a shady character, a doctor known retrogressively as Tod T. Friendly, John
Young, Hamilton de Souza and Odilo Unverdorben. There is a good deal of
onomastic playfulness at work here, since "Tod" means death in
German, a language of considerable importance in this short novel;
"friendly" is life in America, land of benign forgetfulness, where no
one inquires too closely about the suave European stranger in town; and
"young" is what he gets to be as the book goes along.
"Time's Arrow"
begins on Tod Friendly's deathbed in "affable, melting-pot, primary-color,
You're-okay-I'm-okay America. " Weeks go by. He is released from the
hospital. Immediately he has a heart attack in his garden. Then comes a car
crash, followed by "the first installment" of his love life, a fight
with a woman named Irene, who tells him she knows his dark "secret"
because he says it in his sleep. Irene visits more frequently. There are other
women as well. Tod meets them where he works, in the offices of American
Medical Services on a commercial strip somewhere in New England. It is clear
that he is on the run. Every December he gets a letter in primitive code
advising him that the weather continues to be "temperate" in New
York. One year he reads that the weather, "although recently unsettled, is
temperate once more!"
In time, Tod moves to New
York, where he has an emergency meeting with a sinister clergyman who warns him
of danger -- the Immigration and Naturalization Service might act to revoke his
citizenship. Backward he proceeds until, in the summer of 1948, he sets sail
"for Europe, and for war." He continues to shed false identities
until the narrative finally catches up with the horrifying secret deep in his
past, which holds the key to the riddles in his personality and life: Odilo
Unverdorben was a Nazi doctor, a dealer of death in Auschwitz, where he
administered the poison gas used to kill Jews. In the book's relentless
backward logic, he "personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B [ from the
shower room ] and entrusted them to the pharmacist."
For the tale to have
maximum impact, Mr. Amis needs an utterly naive narrator who is ignorant of
modern history and unaware that backward is not the way things are supposed to
go. Postulating a split in his protagonist's personality, Mr. Amis tells the
story from the point of view of the man's alienated psyche or soul, condemned
to witness events without comprehending them. There is pathos in the widening discrepancy
between the reader's knowledge and that of the ghostly narrator. From the
latter's warped vantage point, Auschwitz is a culmination, the one place where
the world makes sense. Previously, the world was illogical. On American
streets, adults snatch toys from children and sanitation workers dispense
rubbish. People are "always looking forward to going places they've just
come back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say
hello when they mean goodbye."
Doctors and hospitals especially
mystify the narrator, for -- in backward time -- patients enter well and leave
sick, while mothers go to the hospital to return their babies. In Auschwitz,
however, creation is accomplished, since murder, at reverse speed, appears to
be the giving of life. Out of ashes and feces, the Jews are assembled --
"the bald girls with their enormous eyes. Just made, and all raw from
their genesis." Indeed, for the spectral narrator, Auschwitz is where the
medical profession works wonders, undoing death on an unprecedented scale.
Mr. Amis's vision of the
Holocaust undone is particularly moving. In Auschwitz, the gold is restored to
the corpses' teeth: "To prevent needless suffering, the dental work was
usually completed while the patients were not yet alive." Then the bodies
return to life in the "Sprinkleroom." In this version of history, on
Kristall nacht the Nazis "all romped and played and helped the Jews."
The racial laws are repealed; the Jews have the rights of citizens. The novel
ends with the annihilation of the Nazi doctor's consciousness -- not by death
but by birth -- concurrent with the restoration to health and prosperity of the
Jews in pre-Nazi Germany.
Since the definitions of
"verdorben" in German include "corrupt" or
"fallen," Mr. Amis's name for his damnable doctor takes on a double
meaning. In an inverted world, "Unverdorben" might be the word for
corrupt. But the word can also mean the opposite -- innocent, unfallen, as if
original sin could be undone. As his wordplay suggests, Mr. Amis -- the author
of "London Fields" and "Money" and the perennial bad boy of
English letters -- is a writer of wit and post-modernist invention, who sets
traps of ironies for readers to stumble into. But there is a moral purpose to
Mr. Amis's experiments with narrative strategy and metaphysical possibility.
The novel's inversions of causality and chronology seem perfectly in keeping
with the Nazis' inversion of morality. In this sense, "Time's Arrow"
implicitly warns us against turning the world of logic upside down or inside
out -- the very thing Mr. Amis does in this fiction.
The backward structure
allows Mr. Amis to solve several narrative problems. As in a detective novel or
psychoanalytic session, the climax occurs with the reconstruction of events
that took place long ago. In addition, with his ghostly narrator Mr. Amis gets
the benefit of both the first-person and the third-person points of view. The
effect is like that of schizophrenia or, in the religious terms Mr. Amis seems
to prefer, the divorce of the soul from the rest of a man's being. Most
audacious is Mr. Amis's appropriation of erasure -- the definitive motif of
deconstruction -- which he applies to the genocide of the Jews. The very
instrument of revisionist history is put to the service of heartbreaking
fiction.
In "Time's
Arrow," Martin Amis has written a book rich in poignancy and savage
indignation.
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