Time's Arrow (novel)
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Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991) is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1991).
Plot
The book recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in a disorienting reverse chronology. The doctor, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse, so he becomes younger and younger during the course of the novel. Amis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation. Amis' use of these techniques is aimed to create an unsettling and irrational aura for both the reader and the doctor; indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the novel deals with the doctor's persistent misunderstanding of the world. For example, he simply accepts that people are to wait for an hour in a physician's waiting room after being examined, although at some points he has doubts about this tradition; he also likens the act of hailing a cab after being paid by the cab driver to be driven to a destination to which he did not want to be driven to a salute to the efficiency of the taxi service.It controversially portrays the doctor's torture and murder of Jews. So while at a concentration camp, he returns the dead to life and heals the sick, rather than the opposite. The broader image presented is that all those that died in the Holocaust are revived and returned to their homes. Eventually they become children, then babies, and then reenter their mother's wombs, where they finally cease to exist. The book is narrated from the perspective of the child-like lost soul or conscience of the main character.
Trivia
As Amis noted in an Author's Note at the beginning of his earlier novel London Fields, he originally considered Time's Arrow as a title for that book.
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