we wait impatiently for the revelation. He goes to New York (even younger now), has meaningless sex with nurses, and traumatises the patients, ripping out their bandages, sticking foreign objects into them before releasing them again, all bloody and broken. He becomes disheartened as the world makes no sense. Doctors should be repairing, not destroying. He leaves again, this time for Europe. He stops over in Spain, then to the Pope, begging for forgiveness. He gets onto a motorcycle and rides into the depths of Central Europe, until he arrives at the one place where his profession, in this reversed time-stream, finally does the right thing. Here, at Auschwitz, he is a healer, not a murderer. And his name is now Odilo Unverdorben. He creates Jews from the ashes of the ovens, from the body heaps, as if their souls fall from heaven onto their naked bodies. At Auschwitz, the world makes sense.After my first read of Time's Arrow (and admittedly it wasn't a very close one), I got the impression that the author spends two thirds of the book gratuitously exploiting the comic possibilities of an inverted tale before getting to the heart of the matter. Indeed, many passages are just Amis showing off, saying "hey, look what I can do!", though they are nonetheless great, comical passages. One example is the passage about the hookers (modern sex is one of Amis's favourite topics), in which the narrator observes that "hookers have this thing for mature men", and that after "an act of love", the same mature men "for some reason, will be swiftly remunerated". It was only when I reread parts of the book as an informed reader rather than a nave (like the narrator) one to prepare for the review did I realise the importance of the narrator's naivete to the overall impact of the book. Like the reader, the narrator begins the book with no previous knowledge of the Nazi doctor, so he has to depend heavily on observations in order to understand ...
