Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous Book Report Times Arrow Book Report Times Arrow Book Review: Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis Did it hurt when you fell from heaven? Life is no bowl of cherries. Sometimes you can't explain everything. You just can't, and Martin Amis knows this. Time's Arrow is a book on the holocaust. There is nothing new about its material, and it makes no attempt at explaining anything. So why bother reading (or writing) it? What separates this book from your average "holocaust book" is that this really will, as it says on the backcover, present you with a "different" perspective. Time's Arrow is not your typical holocaust book. It does more than just make your head think - it takes you through the whole ordeal backwards. The story begins on the main character's deathbed, and through him the author explores how life would appear, how it would feel and what sense it would seem to make if it were like a film running backwards - if time's arrow were to reverse its direction and allow us to watch history unfold itself, line by line, gesture by gesture, until we are sucked back into our mothers' wombs. Hence construction becomes destruction, healing is wounding, age is youth, future turns into history and so on. As you can imagine, things can get rather confusing (luckily, Amis keeps the words in dialogues in the normal order). The story is told in the first-person and third-person, first-person being the innocent narrator who sees things backwards and third-person the doctor whose body the narrator is for some unknown reason trapped in. Bar the fact that it is in reverse, the plot is simple: The narrator wakes up from his deathbed and discovers that he is living his life backwards. He finds out that he is a doctor, living in small-town America. His name is Tod Friendly. He gets younger and comes out of retirement, breaking up with his old lovers before meeting them in intimate embraces. All the while it becomes clearer and clearer that there is some great secret in his future (or past), and 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 naïve (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 his predicament in the world around him. In essence, the entire book is a diary of observations. I particularly enjoy the short but cute summaries of two decades of history. For instance, when the book reaches the sixties, Amis writes: "Cars are fatter and fewer, and imitate animals with their wings. Syringes are no longer disposable. The standing of doctors in society is higher than ever…everyone smokes and drinks and messes around. No one works out." Often the reader would not realise the significance of some of these observations until he reaches the last third of the book. And when the narrator talks about the "unkind" deeds that Tod Friendly had been doing, like taking toys from children or stealing money from the church bowl, he is really describing Tod's search for redemption. "The forgiving look you get from everybody on the way in - Tod seems to need it, the social reassurance. We sit in line and worship a corpse," observes the narrator. In another particularly sharp observation by the narrator, he says, "[Tod] has stopped driving to Wellport, but I bet he misses our time there, its vigourlessness so safe and morally neutral." Other less subtle observations include Tod's nightmares and self-inflicted injuries at night, both of which are obvious demonstrations of guilt. Much of the suspense of the book is provided through the technique of foreshadowing. We know from very early on through his dreams and his conversations with Irene that Tod has a dark secret, and once he starts moving houses (and eventually changing names), it becomes increasingly apparent that Tod Friendly is on the run, especially when every December he gets a letter in primitive code advising him that the weather continues to be "temperate" in New York (while one year he reads that the weather, "although recently unsettled, is temperate once more!"). The first clue to Tod's involvement in the Second World War comes like this: "There is another war coming…Tod is highly sensitive to this material. It affects him like a smell, like a chime." The image of the holocaust becomes clearer and clearer as the story unravels. When the narrator sees the black and white photo that threatens Tod's US citizenship, he immediately realises that it is about power, and that there were twelve men of two "distinct human types" where one type belonged to the living and the other to the dead. The innocence of the narrator also makes it easier for Amis to slip his personal feelings into the book. When the narrator finally realises that the secret has to do with the dreams where "the half dead stand in line and a white-coated sweats with power", he says: "…but the dreams lied. I thought (I was sure) that our transgression would be some kind of departure. I thought it would be extraterritorial, out of society, forming its own universe. I certainly never figured Tod/John for a life of crime." Clearly, Amis still finds it hard to believe that the holocaust was an act of human design. The accustomed irony of the narrator's observations reaches new heights when the story moves to Auschwitz: "I saw the old Jew struggle to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by the mire." The narrator then goes on to report that all the medical experiments at Auschwitz are a success: "A shockingly inflamed eyeball at once rectified by a single injection. Innumerable ovaries and testes seamlessly grafted into place. Women went out of that lab looking 20 years younger." 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." Suddenly, for the first time in the narrator's existence, the world "makes sense". The "German" part of the book is where the innocent, backwards narration really hits home. By describing the atrocities obliquely, the impact on the reader is more painful than it would have been with a direct description. Now we understand the primary significance of the book's backwardness. The Holocaust was the ultimate repudiation and reversal of human morality. Its world of gas chambers and crematoriums was obscenely wrong, still inconceivable to most people even today. For the narrator, of course, it was the only world which made sense -- a happy world, dedicated to feeding the Jews, joining their families together, giving them property, rights, and even life. Only in a backwards world where taking is giving, and where destruction is creation can the holocaust make sense. Actually, he does offer one explanation as to why Tod/Odilo would consent to genocide when he writes: "I've come to the conclusion that Odilo, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers." By matching this statement up with his previous sayings about how "National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology" and how doctors are basically "biological soldiers", one gets the sense that Amis is trying to lift some of the blame off the individuals and putting more on the Nazi society whose health they have been dependent on. Now the puzzle of Tod's later life all fits together; even his assumed name acquires a new significance, as "Tod" is German for "death". "Tod Friendly" therefore represents the two phases of his life: the German years occupied with death, followed by the desperate friendliness he offered as atonement. As for "Verdorben", since its definitions in German include "corrupt" or "fallen", Amis's name for the 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 (or it could even be a description 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 a brilliant robot you switch on and stand back and admire as it does all the hard work." Would it be too bold for one to presuppose that Mr. Amis sees the Germans as a somewhat linear, robotic race (reminiscent of the German national football team)? Amis also discusses how Odilo and his friends were infuriated with the Jews before the fascists took over because they were "walking into all the plum jobs, in the medical profession especially." Parallels could be drawn between the German distaste for Jews and the American distaste for the Japanese ("we really hated the Japanese."). And of course, the book ends in Germany, with the Nazi doctor exterminated by birth, concurrent with the restoration of health and prosperity of the Jews in pre-Nazi Germany. Amis is at his most entertaining when he talks about sex. "Suddenly, to Tod's glands, the world is a woman," proclaims Amis triumphantly, the observation being that Tod would "tip forward onto his feet" and look over any outline across the road, just in case it is a woman. As for John Young, the "younger" version of Tod Friendly, his main hobby is women's bodies, and to him, the fact that a woman's body has a head on top "isn't much more of a detail". And this is Amis on homosexuality: "The homosexual man is fine…so long as he knows he's homosexual. It's when he is, and thinks he isn't: then there's confusion." Mr. Amis is indeed typically modern English. Given Amis' apparent admiration for American culture in real life - he has an American agent, an American lover and is currently thinking of emigrating - he does not give much away in terms of his take on the Big Apple. Of the very little that we can focus on, he describes New York as a city that contains "a fire-tinge of violence", and he uses predictable adjectives like "affable", "primary colour" (compared to Germany's ashen grey), and "You're-okay-I'm-okay" to characterise America. Since his arrival in the mid-seventies, Martin Amis has been the enfant terrible of the British lit scene. Many critics consider him to be a masterful writer enginned by a banal, unoriginal mind, while others think he is simply one step ahead. The same critics would probably argue that style and technique supersedes feeling, sensibility and morality in Time's Arrow. Indeed, there are occasions when Amis' cleverness does undercut the moralism he is trying to convey, but that is not due to faulty morals, but to the extraordinary flair that he possesses. Even if you don't want to hear what Amis has to say about the holocaust, read this book - if nothing else, going through time backwards might just teach you the good parts of life that people tend to miss going forwards. Bibliography: time's arrow by martin amis Word Count: 2558
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