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chrisssl 's review for:
Time's Arrow
by Martin Amis
challenging
dark
funny
fast-paced
I came to this short book expecting a unique but easy, breezy read-through that I could use to decompress from some of the thicker, denser novels I'd finished lately. Boy was I wrong. In under 200 pages, this book manages to be funny, profound and quite challenging, something which I needed to carefully think about after reading a dozen pages in each sitting rather than something I could easily inhale in a day. The premise of this book is that we experience life through the eyes of powerless narrator in a world in which nourishment comes from the toilet, material possessions arrive via divine fire and the abyss of the trash heap, men break up with women before starting their relationship, and everyone, everywhere always seems to be giving you money. The narrator is a consciousness moving backwards in time beginning at the end of the 20th century, entirely ignorant of the natural way of arranging cause and effect, slave to the ignorant whims of his host: Tod Friendly, incapable of any action beyond thought and observation.
This is not the first time I've seen a premise like this, but it is the first time I've seen a book commit to this idea to such laborious extent. The result is a truly strange thought experiment that is so contrary to the way we understand stories and requires us to constantly and actively think in order to decipher what is happening in the perspective of someone travelling backwards. But more than a thought experiment, it rises to a fine novel in it's own right, which manages to construct such a strange and poignant series of observations by flipping one dimension on its head. The beginning of the book is charming in the narrator's wonder, his curious innocent observations and his sad bewilderment with the incomprehensible nature of the world. The writing is well-thought and intelligent, but after the first hundred pages a reader might ask if there's anything more to this book: sure it's entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking to witness the 20th century in reverse, but is it at all cogent or applicable to our cause-effect world? Is it any more than creative but irrelevant fantasy? Yes. Because rather than being just a more fleshed out version of that famed reversed film-reel in Slaughterhouse V in which atrocities and wars become visions of healing and restoration, the book forges ahead into events of historic horror, in which the direction one perceives both cancels out its atrocity and accentuates it to a heady degree. I must remain vague for plot purposes, but it works to such a breathtaking creative effect, sticking to the rules established in the book, but changing the effects dramatically.
The story is thought-provoking and rarely cheats its own rules, however I find the prose to be a bit of a weakness. It is clearly trying, reaching for profundity in occasional philosophical moments, but these never work all that well and these sections become awkward and unwieldy in their confused imagery and zany sophomoric imitations of stronger post-war writers like Vonnegut, Roth and Updike. The story provides much depth to stew over and works magically, in spite of a somewhat ambitious but cluttered style of prose.
This is not the first time I've seen a premise like this, but it is the first time I've seen a book commit to this idea to such laborious extent. The result is a truly strange thought experiment that is so contrary to the way we understand stories and requires us to constantly and actively think in order to decipher what is happening in the perspective of someone travelling backwards. But more than a thought experiment, it rises to a fine novel in it's own right, which manages to construct such a strange and poignant series of observations by flipping one dimension on its head. The beginning of the book is charming in the narrator's wonder, his curious innocent observations and his sad bewilderment with the incomprehensible nature of the world. The writing is well-thought and intelligent, but after the first hundred pages a reader might ask if there's anything more to this book: sure it's entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking to witness the 20th century in reverse, but is it at all cogent or applicable to our cause-effect world? Is it any more than creative but irrelevant fantasy? Yes. Because rather than being just a more fleshed out version of that famed reversed film-reel in Slaughterhouse V in which atrocities and wars become visions of healing and restoration, the book forges ahead into events of historic horror, in which the direction one perceives both cancels out its atrocity and accentuates it to a heady degree. I must remain vague for plot purposes, but it works to such a breathtaking creative effect, sticking to the rules established in the book, but changing the effects dramatically.
The story is thought-provoking and rarely cheats its own rules, however I find the prose to be a bit of a weakness. It is clearly trying, reaching for profundity in occasional philosophical moments, but these never work all that well and these sections become awkward and unwieldy in their confused imagery and zany sophomoric imitations of stronger post-war writers like Vonnegut, Roth and Updike. The story provides much depth to stew over and works magically, in spite of a somewhat ambitious but cluttered style of prose.