It's an impossibility, really. For time to move backwards. Like water flowing uphill. Or Newton's apple whizzing into the tree. But Amis's Time's Arrow makes it work.
It begins at the end, in hospital in New York. “I moved forward out of the blackest sleep, to find myself surrounded by doctors ... American doctors.” The voice is the voice of the unnamed protagonist. It emerges that he’s an escaped Nazi, an Auschwitz alumnus. Underling to the repulsive Dr Mengele, known in the book as Uncle Pepi.
The story unfolds. It’s like flicking through a picture book, back to front. Amis’s vivid, visual language drags us from New York, to Portugal, to the Vatican, “long loot-crammed passages, with glass cases full of baubles and beauties”, the escape route for the worst of the worst. It’s leading inexorably to the black hole that is Auschwitz. It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing that the only way is down.
Amis’s imagination and linguistic agility know no bounds. In New York: “The pimps and the little hookers ... The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them.” “Our clothes came at us ... a shoe like a heavy old bullet thrown out of the shadows, and skilfully caught”, and in the Auschwitz gas chamber: “I would monitor proceedings through the viewing slit ... I always felt a gorgeous relief at the moment of the first stirring. Then it was ugly again. Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life.”
How to write a novel about the Holocaust. Do what Amis does. Take away the logic, the reasoning. “Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where.” Take away everything that gives us understanding. All that is left is the inescapable magnetic pull. Towards the horror.
