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Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, pp 176, £13.99

There are no such things as literary humilities. Literary conceits,
however, abound, and are often, indeed, rather full of themselves. The narrative
of Time’s Arrow’s is founded on the trick that a Nazi war criminal, Dr Tod
Friendly, about to die in an American present-day hospital, instead goes
back in time through the life he has already lived, from gaining a new identity
in America, to working in Auschwitz, to a naive Nazi adolescence. The author
of Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis, must have run around the room clapping his
hands, shouting ‘Booker! Booker!’ when he thought of this one because, on
the face of it, it presents fascinating moral and artistic possibilities.

The story is related in the first person by a kind of Tod Friendly alter
ego, at once Tod and not Tod – Tod, after all, has genuinely lived and felt
the life that new Tod watches pass by in front of him. So new Tod ‘grows
up’ learning the lessons of life played backwards in the way that a child
learns lessons the normal way round. For the new Tod, ‘Creation . . . is
easy, is quick.’

Amis is certainly doing a good job of thinking through the science –
the practicalities – of the conceit. Love affairs begin with last-straw
arguments. Prostitutes hang around street corners desperate to pay middle-aged
men to sleep with them. More serious, of course, are the almost magic realist
accounts of concentration camps, where Jews are restored to health by the
touch of the demoniacal surgeons’ scalpels and are brought back to life
thanks to their time in the gas ovens.

But whatever Stephen Hawking might have to say on the subject, everyday
time (which is the ‘time’, generally speaking, of the novel form) does tend
to go forwards. Consequently, there’s about as much chance of saying something
profound using this device as there is in missing out every third ‘e’. Amis’s
book is sometimes funny and sometimes clever; but it is never remotely moving
or profound, simply because its problems are those of logical physics, not
emotional metaphysics.

As pulp science fiction, this book might be fine. But Amis, despite
his rather studied glibness, clearly intends this work to be seen as ‘literature’.
An afterword defends the integrity of writing about the Holocaust, but if
the book offends it’s precisely because of this nicely-nicely worthiness
which announces its pseudo moral and artistic message. Ultimately, this
book’s conceit has a lot to be humble about.

Andrew Clifford is a freelance writer.