on of the narrator).Although most things make more sense forwards rather than backwards, there are things that seem to work the same either way. For a start, no matter which way you look at it, doctors are "life's gatekeepers". As Tod once said to Irene, "You don't want to listen to doctors. They'll try and get their knives in you." Using the futility of all Tod's personal relations, Amis hints that either way, relationships lacks real direction: "I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them anyway you liked--and still get no further forward." What about things that make more sense backwards? Excluding the holocaust, not much, although ecologically, turning cars into iron ore and replacing it in the earth has a certain appeal that going in the other direction lacks. Also, I suppose it would be nice if petrol got cheaper and cheaper, since the world is constantly discovering more oil despite the constant Malthusian fear of an oil "crisis".Sly comments on German culture and language are scattered all over the book. Amis describes the hidden language in Tod's head as "a language in which machines might converse when no human being is around to listen." One doesn't even need to know what that sentence really means to realise that it is referring to the German language. "The German girl is a natural girl. She comes just as she is. With no make up and hairy legs," observes Amis (though Claudia Schiffer fans have a right to disagree). When the narrator points out that "Tod gives [the women] the creeps", one wonders whether or not the comment is directed at Tod alone or the average German. Same goes to the observation of the "skull's smile". He also makes fun of "Ich", the German version of "I", and when the narrator finally gets to grips with his German, he boasts that "[his] German worked like a dream, like...
