The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald

We hear occasionally of writer’s writers, but surely W. G. Sebald is the writer who most deserves the title of the professor’s writer. There was not a lecturer in all the German department at university who was not constantly in rapture over the fellow, which is perhaps a little ironic given that the kind of essays Sebald writes in his fiction would receive very low marks were they ever handed in to a supervisor. Sebald is a magical writer because he is entirely sui generis. His fiction, so far as I can make out, with Austerlitz and The Emigrants and a few of his essays under my belt, consists entirely of slightly befuddled narrators wandering about and reading inscriptions, letters, journals, architecture, and other remnants of the past out of a malaise they cannot quite give a name to.

Where in essays we are told to write arguments that are clear and precise, where in fiction we are told to show, rather than tell, Sebald does the opposite with his storytelling. Yet is it not a little curious that precisely this kind of obstruction in prose produces works which, when an intellect is applied to them like a knife to a whetstone, give that intellect the highest of pleasures? The joy of Sebald consists of being led from place to place, from thought to thought, from figure to figure, and being dimly aware of the significance of it all. There is a pattern, a web of connection, spreading across the words on the page – we just cannot see it all. Like those other extremely visceral writers (Borges, Mann), we feel a little stupid when we read him. But as with those writers, what little we do understand leaves us elated, proud, and wiser.

The Rings of Saturn is about a walking tour of Suffolk in England. Structurally, it has something in common with Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in that its ostensible travel through the English countryside pales beside the distances travelled in the mind. But where Ishiguro’s story is about Stevens’s personal history, Sebald’s novel is more general. Throughout its ten chapters we encounter many individuals and delve into many real pasts, but the narrator is always a spectator, a witness. His heart and his story is always closed, so we are left to draw the connections between, and the emotional significance of, what he relates entirely by ourselves.

What is told concerns the more melancholy side of the world we are but brief guests in: death, decay, destruction. Countless dying towns and discarded mansions provide the narrator ample opportunities to reflect upon everything from the opium wars to the consequences of Thatcherism and EU farming policy, from the Troubles to the French Revolution. Each place and sight sweeps the narrator into the past. As a writer, Sebald has a strange familial linkage to those adventure and ghost narratives involving material stumbled upon by outsiders. In considering the past he uses among others letters, memoirs, conversations, and old educational films. Taken together, they add a documentary precision to the story. It is one of those reasons why we can think of Sebald as a supremely realistic writer. It helps that The Rings of Saturn is one of those strange books that is neither fiction nor memoir, but somewhere in between.

This style is extremely distinctive, hence also easily parodied. In each chapter we have some physical movement by the narrator, followed by the reflections on a place, which lead to a reflection on the people who lived there. People encountered, in body or spirit, include Joseph Conrad, Sir Thomas Browne, Chateaubriand, a Chinese Empress, various Austrian monarchs, and many others. We read about the decay of British seaside towns, the collapse into the sea of the medieval village of Dunwich, the slow overgrowth of a still-inhabited Irish manor house. What separates Sebald’s narrator’s musings from that of the average educated individual at some prestige literary magazine is Sebald’s magnificently broad erudition and the alarming ease with which he shifts from topic to topic. The prose is so smooth you have to slow yourself down or you might miss the brutality of almost everything Sebald actually narrates.

For it is with a certain resignation that Sebald compasses human existence with his vision. Human nature is not on some glorious ramp of improvement. Destruction seems to be in our very veins, we feel as we read descriptions of the vast burnings of old-growth forest in England by its first settlers and then thousands of years later, of Chinese palaces by British soldiers during the Opium Wars. We seem, as a species, determined to exploit and destroy. The very image of our mastery for Sebald is the light we send across the darkened sky, but it is for him a thing more of disquiet than of joy. At one point he notes a vision of an historical village, still lit late at night by the workers forced to weave the silk that contributed to the beginnings of Great Britain’s economic hegemony. We create light, through fires, fuelled by things we destroy – from forests to the buildings annihilated in the Allied firebombing campaign in World War II.

The first chapter states something that might seem ridiculous, I think, to the average Brit – that as Sebald’s narrator began his walk he had been attacked with “the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.” Yet The Rings of Saturn is a document of so many of these horrors that I, who confess to finding the landscape of England for the most part forgettable and uninspiring, now think I shall never be able to look at it in quite the same way. We may dismissively say that Sebald’s narrator demonstrates the dangers of education, in revealing to us too much. But really what he does is explore the networks of complicity and guilt that bind us all to the earth and which can sometimes be easily missed.

Now, naturally, we are wiser to the worst excesses of our past. At the National Portrait Gallery, where I was yesterday, I heard a small boy ask his mother whether one of the people on the wall was “like Colston”. This struck me, on balance, as progress. That the wealth behind many manor houses came from exploitative practices is not likely to come as news to many, but perhaps the range of practices is. We see the decline of the herring through overfishing, the decline of fishing as a result of that, and then the decline of the countryside as the gentry became obsessed with hunting to the detriment of all else. We see, all told, humanity overstepping limits it did not know or else refused to recognise, and being crushed by an indifferent nature, in the form of fire and of storm, the latter of which destroyed the great village of Dunwich, casting it into the sea.

The sea, appropriately for a walking tour of Suffolk, is probably the central image in The Rings of Saturn. It reflects the cyclical view of history that Sebald presents here, where destruction follows creation, ebb follows flow. For if this book were merely a chronicle of human failings, it would be perhaps too bleak to read. Instead, it is chequered with human successes, some of them well worthy of recollection. We have a man recreating the temple of Jerusalem in miniature, we have the memories of the towns and houses before they fell into their present states, we have good men like Roger Casement, who reported on colonial atrocities and fought for Irish independence, and we have so many achievements of the mind – in Browne, in Conrad, in Swinburne, in Edward Fitzgerald.

Reading a book like The Rings of Saturn is something like a game, more so than even other serious literary works which at least have a story for us to follow. Here we are constantly on the lookout for connections, for patterns in this grand tapestry of historical tragedy. I wrote little diagrams at the end of some of the chapters, with lines connecting the topics. A train was connected to Dunwich and China, which were both in turn connected, albeit separately, to the poet Swinburne. The educational film on herring in chapter III led Sebald also to the documentation of silkworm cultivation in the Third Reich which ends the final chapter. Thomas Browne pops up here and there, as does Borges’ mysterious story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Throughout history, we see the destructive power of the sea and of fire, and a constant disregard for proper burial. Browne was reburied, as was Sir Roger Casement.

Reading Sebald is always an experience. On the one hand, the pleasure of finding these connections, of joining him in the recovery of the past, is great. On the other, there’s something false about the narrator’s reticence. He describes, but his emotions are always kept locked away. This refusal to provide answers might make the work intellectually rewarding, but it also makes the work emotionally ambiguous. Why not condemn what is worthy of it, why not say explicitly what you wish to say? I feel like that sometimes, but there is a counterpoint below which on reflection is probably more valid.

This short article, which says precisely the opposite of what I am saying, is worth glancing at. Sebald is, after all, one of those people who is deeply occupied with the Holocaust, indeed with all holocausts. He knows, we can fairly say, the limits to our expression. After all, it becomes trite after a while to say that war is bad or men are cruel. These are just words, however great the feeling behind them is. And words repeated empty themselves of their own meaning, their own force. Perhaps the effort of drawing the connections between the objects of his novel is precisely what Sebald thinks is the only morally responsible way of engaging with our past, so that when we step back, having finished with our diagrammatic representation of the work, covering our entire wall from floor to ceiling, only then are we able to truly appreciate the sinews of pain and mourning that are the one true and constant keynote in human history.

Yes, no doubt he is right.

Blood Meridian

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Blood and death and violence. The peak of human evil, perhaps. Blood Meridian is, for most people, the most violent and horrific book they have ever read. There is nothing here of love or affection. Tenderness is a thing that little survives an axe to the brain. Babies are murdered and hung on trees like Christmas decorations. Men, women, and children are slaughtered for less than a sideways glance. Yet worse than this is the knowledge that most of this book is a true thing, that John Joel Glanton’s gang was not a fiction but a living pandemonium that truly walked upon the earth in the middle of the 19th century. Cormac McCarthy retraced its marauding steps time after time in writing this book.

Blood Meridian is sustained by its own brutality. Each chapter is a litany of bloodshed through which we stumble, confused and in awe, lost in the power of an almighty language being wielded only to describe that which in our conscious moments we have no wish to see described.

What it is, is a novel about man’s descent (for there are no women, except as bodies to be broken) into barbarism. We may think we know the type. Heart of Darkness and its ilk have prepared us, we think. But Heart of Darkness is less about Kurtz’s descent as it is about Marlow’s coming to terms with it. Marlow has his ideas of right and wrong, just as Kurtz has his own – soon distorted – ideas of the same. It is a moral book, however much it seems to rise from the jungle’s murk.

Blood Meridian is neither a moral book, nor an immoral book. What makes it so frightening is that it is merely an amoral book. “Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.” It is the story of a gang who begins by killing violent Indians in exchange for bounty and loot, then move on to killing peaceful ones, then they kill the Mexicans who hired them to protect themselves from the Indians, and eventually, they kill Americans. That is the simple story which we witness when we read the book.

Some Theory: John Williams on What A Western Should Be

John Williams, author of Augustus and Stoner and most relevantly the Western Butcher’s Crossing, also wrote a programmatic piece, “The “Western”: Definition of the Myth”, which might help us to appreciate Blood Meridian. Williams was writing at a time before McCarthy had switched his stories’ backdrops from the Appalachians to the southwest United States, before the Western genre was made serious with such books as Warlock, and films in our own day like The Power of the Dog. His main complaint of the genre was that its practitioners misunderstood it, and adopted literary modes that were not appropriate.

Williams argues that the traditional Western is purely a thing of “an element conflict between the personified forces of Good and Evil”, which is not inherent in the material but rather a transference of “the New England Calvinist habit of mind” that sees the world, at times without being fully aware of it, as broken up into the damned and the saved. This moral rigidity, whatever complexities might be added to the stock characters of the western, such as the cowboy and sheriff, mean that “beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.” It is about arranging a world where the right judgement can be acted out.

For Williams, the west is not tragic, nor comic, nor epic, but mythic in nature, and this is what he thinks previous writers have failed to recognise. Tragedy is primarily about powerful figures, often historical, suffering, that we might see as “the cost of disorder in an ordered universe.” Epic, meanwhile, is about cultural unification – it is about telling a story that collects together ideas for the building of a nation. It requires this element of nation-building or nationalism, because “the heroism, the bloodletting, the superhuman bravery, the terrible mutilations – these are given point and intensity only by the nationalistic impulse that lies behind them. Without that impulse, the adventure (handled epically) is empty, is bombast, is violence without rage.” This is an idea we will come back to, because under this definition Blood Meridian is easily readable as an anti-epic, as nation-destruction rather than building.

Myth, however, and not anything else is what Williams sees as appropriate for Westerns. He defines it as an approach where “the mythic subject rises from the enveloping action of history, but the events that detail that subject are invented.” The myth is thus a combination of history and fiction, but it is not historical fiction, even though we are aware of as many historical forces – economic, social, cultural, and religious – as the author may wish to include. “The events and characters… are intensely symbolic and they compel belief on a level different from that of historical reality.” The mythic work is symbolic, its characters are often archetypes, stretching beyond themselves in their significance.

The heart of the mythic is the inner quest. This is what distinguishes it from tragedy, where quests and conflicts are generally public and on the level of the state, and from comedy, where conflicts are generally domestic and lie between characters. The mythic, for Williams, is about the acquisition of inner knowledge that can only be bittersweet – “the exaction of the human spirit by the terror of truth.” “The outcome of myth is always mixed; its quest is for an order of the self that is gained at the expense of knowing, at last, the essential chaos of the universe.” If tragedy is about breaking order, myth is about creating a pocket of order whose diminutive size makes us only more aware of the world’s general disorder.

For a mythic tale to work well, history must play a role. In the case of the Western myth, the history is one of exploitation – of people but, primarily for Williams, of land. The period of the frontiersman is one of the lone being attempting to survive in a new land, rather than of the state trying to grow itself through the organised murder of prior inhabitants. People entering that world, coming from the East, brought with them their simplified ideas of good and evil, which crashed and were broken against the reality of a cruel and indifferent sun. This is the central theme of Butcher’s Crossing. Here, a “voyage not the wilderness was most meaningfully a voyage into the self, experimental, private and sometimes obscure.”

To summarise, for Williams, the Western is most appropriately a mythic tale. It is deeply lodged in its own time, like Moby Dick, but it is peopled with symbolic characters who reach beyond themselves in their meanings, and whose essential journeys are internal and with results which are not entirely welcome.

Blood Meridian is both an epic and mythic work, according to the ideas Williams describes, but in both cases, the novel is something quite different to the “straight” interpretation of either approach. Let’s begin with the case of the epic. Western novels, as he acknowledges, have often relied upon epic themes and motifs, but with the exception of the Indian Wars, nationalism and nation-building have been less important than the individual’s struggle for survival and success in a new land. In Blood Meridian we have part of the American wars of conquest, with our character, “the kid”, at first joining a group of soldiers under Captain White to go and murder Mexicans in spite of the recently signed peace treaty that ended the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

This figure, White, is an unpleasant one, but his views are somewhat unique in the novel. “A race of degenerates… There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them.” White, practically alone among the misfits of Blood Meridian, sees the matter in terms of governance and the growth of the United States. If his views are unpleasant and Hobbesian, then they are also the only views in the novel which are concerned with administration. It is he, whom we might say, belongs in an epic work – though not one we may necessarily be proud of.

Still, they are fallen upon by Indians and White and most of the “army” are slaughtered. The scene is epic, and here McCarthy’s language reaches a pitch that anywhere else would be ridiculous, yet here is Biblical, Homeric:

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Here the language is distinctly non-specific, with the enemies of the Americans containing so many hints of other identities that they become clearly mythic and symbolic in character. White’s group, building a nation, fight against the forces of disorder, and those forces annihilate him.

“The kid” survives. And here the novel begins its anti-epic shift. If White was trying to pacify and crush people for the good of some absurd American nation, Glanton’s gang fight Indians, Mexicans and finally Americans only ever ostensibly for such goals, and time after time we are reminded that their goals are instead more simple, crude, and barbaric. They go to towns to debauch themselves, eating so much food that the townsfolk starve afterwards, they amass great riches and commit crimes so terrible that murder must have seemed a solace to those gifted it, and there is no nation to be built.

It is in this regard that people, including those on my copy’s blurb, have called the novel an anti-Western. It is an unheroic novel, a barbaric novel, where the Indians are not made victims but rather where every specimen of humanity seems determined to drag itself down into the depths of human cruelty. And all of this is related in prose that is entirely unjudging, that never questions or looks into people’s heads except when they have been splattered across a saloon’s wall, so that we feel silly for wanting there to be a point to it all.

If we want to find meaning, we must look at the novel as a mythic work. Such an interpretation is natural when our characters have names like “the kid”, “the judge”, “the expriest”, which eclipse any real names, Holden and Tobin for the latter two, that characters actually have, and when we journey through volcanoes and larger-than-life landscapes and see tarot cards and meet fools in cages. But here, too, there is something unusual that sets the novel outside of the mythic categorisation Williams gives – the sheer lack of interiority.

“The kid” is the character we follow, more or less, throughout the work. But he rarely speaks, and rarely does he act. He is more than anything else a witness to the novel. He is, in other words, like us. And so, it is most fitting to say that the journey to some kind of personal order within a disordered universe is primarily not in him, but in us, the readers, who are forced to confront this most awful tale in the hopes of extracting meaning. The narrator, who merely describes, has no epiphany. So that just leaves us.

But what order, what myth, lies within the bloodshed? The truth is that the novel is about power. It is a mythic representation of power, especially in Western history, and “the judge”, who is one of the most memorable characters I have ever encountered in fiction, anywhere, is power itself.

We meet him, seven foot tall, without a hair on his body, “serene and strangely childlike”, as a reverend is preaching to a gathered room. He steps forward unexpectedly, and declares that the reverend is a fraud. After a short speech he declares, “in truth, the gentleman standing here before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” A man in the audience immediately shoots the reverend and chaos breaks out. Back at the bar, the judge gets himself a drink. Someone asks him how he knew the reverend was a fraud. “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.”

The incident is the perfect introduction to the world of Blood Meridian and how little human life is worth there. It is also the perfect introduction to Judge Holden. Gigantic, multilingual, an amateur botanist, geologist and artist, the judge seems to embody knowledge itself. With his ability to speak eloquently, he has the ability to kill without moving a muscle, because none of the men in the West and in Mexico have the knowledge he does, and so they listen and defer to him, trusting whatever he says. There are several signs suggesting he is probably the devil.

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” In those words is his philosophy entire. He learns about the world to gain mastery over it. Unlike White, who at least in name acts for the United States, Holden acts for himself and the growth of his own suzerainty over the world. At one point he says he would have every bird in the world contained within a zoo, that not one of them might have freedom. Blood Meridian was published in 1985. By that point, we had the apotheosis of human power, the atomic bomb. We had also put men and women into camps and slaughtered them on a scale that the murderers of Blood Meridian could only dream of. Human history is many things, but one of them is the increased power of technology over nature, and the use of that power to cause harm to other people.

The judge is that power. He sits and takes notes on plants and flowers, drawing them in his notebook. He saves the gang from certain doom by creating new ammunition for them using gathered guano and sulphur at a volcano. Through force of will and force of knowledge, he gains strength over others, the environment, and himself: “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

The ultimate place where power is tested is in war. It is here, as some of the quotes above have indicated, that might determine right, and all other considerations, moral and spiritual and jurisprudential, fall away. In the judge’s reckoning, war is “the ultimate trade” because every other aspect of human existence feeds into one’s success or failure within it: “all other trades are contained in that of war.”

Depending on how cynical we are being, we may agree with the judge. War’s horrible wonder lies partly in the way that it is a complete and total experience, that takes all of our existence and demands everything from our bodies and souls for victory’s attainment. It takes everything from our minds, as we use knowledge to create new weapons and strategies. And from our souls as we destroy ourselves as decent human beings to destroy more capably the enemy standing or sitting opposite us. As the judge remarks, “war is god.” It is also evil.

The judge is evil by other measurements too. But that Calvinistic good-and-evil approach that Williams criticises bears little fruit here. The judge is a mythic creature. His physical attributes are superhuman. He tells us that he shall never die. He spends much of the story naked or wrapped in robes, wandering at night. Glanton’s gang fears him and sits in awe of him, turn by turn. He does no good, but the truth that he carries within himself is not strictly speaking evil. It is an acknowledgement of the state of things: “Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.” The disorder that Blood Meridian reveals is that there is no order here, except what we have placed here, and it is inadequate to the task of mastering creation. “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way.”

The story as a whole is one of a gang who, themselves disordered and led by an agent of chaos, become forces for the destruction of order within others. They are symbolic of untethered natures and the consequences of a world without any unifying principles. In such a world, only power can unify. And the judge has the most power because instead of simply gaining pistols and rifles he has determined to populate his mind with knowledge that can be used for violence too.

What do we, readers, get from this myth? Because knowledge comes to us. We understand the disorder, and because we understand it without experiencing it first-hand, we may yet be able to build a better order – personally, or on a larger scale. Blood Meridian is a mirror of human cruelty and brutality, an artefact of evils passed. It is a lesson and an unignorable initiation for those who might be tempted to ignore this side of human nature. If we want power, we must have knowledge. And knowledge without moral feeling is just chaos and destruction. With epic scale and epic scope, mythic prose and Judge Holden one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered in any media, Blood Meridian is a book to read and read again.

Cormac McCarthy died last month, June 2023. He has written some of the most brilliant, awe-inspiring fiction I have ever read. Until such time as I can write about him in a way that does him justice, you can read scattered thoughts on The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses here.

The Guiltless Gliding of Amis’s Time’s Arrow

The success of a gimmick lies in whether it makes any messages in the story more effective, or whether it distracts and annoys us more than anything else. With a subject like the Holocaust, we certainly do not want the latter result. And yet the Holocaust has been the topic of many novels that have used non-standard forms and structures to deliver their messages. From this we might conclude that with such a serious topic the standard narrative approaches simply will not do.

Among others, we have that reconstructional striving we encounter in the works of W.G. Sebald, where characters seem determined to walk and read and effortfully remake the past, scrap by informational scrap. We have the cyclicity of Günter Grass’s Cat and Mouse, where the story can never end because the protagonist can never quite admit their guilt. We even have the time-skips of the thoroughly mediocre The Reader.

Time’s Arrow shares with these works an unusual approach. Martin Amis’s novel is told backwards, from a man’s death to his birth. I can only think of Delillo’s Underworld as having done something similar, and I cannot recall it adding anything there. But here, given the subject matter is a doctor at Auschwitz who successfully flees to the United States before dying of natural causes, we might assume the guilt component to be more prominent. The way, that is, that an earlier mistake might shape the life that follows, and then also how earlier decisions must have made that most mistaken of careers possible as well. This thread of interest must be enough for us, because all tension is removed when every beginning is really an end.

We follow the life of Odilo Unverdorben, who is first an old man alone in the US with the ridiculous name Tod Friendly (though Unverdorben is also dire – it means “untainted” in German), then a doctor both in New York and further afield, before heading to Europe shortly after the Second World War. We spend time in Auschwitz, then watch as he trains to become an SS Officer and courts his wife. Then he becomes a boy and re-enters his mother. We do not have access to Odilo’s thoughts, only to his emotions. We are trapped inside his body with another, unnamed person, the narrator, who may be Odilo’s soul. “Passenger or parasite,” that is our role.

This character – the narrator – is quite odd. He seems deliberately restricted in his access to information in a way that I found unsatisfactory. He knows all about Jews, for example, but nothing about the Holocaust or history. He’s essentially given a random assortment of knowledge, such that he can appreciate the world, while still being utterly bewildered by it. At no point, for example, does he realise that things are going backward. He just comments on how bizarre it is that things are the way they are.

For unlike Delillo’s novel, which is a series of vignettes in reverse chronological order, in Time’s Arrow the narrative is actually reversed. We read dialogue in ordered English, but the end of the conversation comes first. The same is true of actions. Doctors, in this world, cause damage and throw people, bloodied and broken, back onto the streets. Relationships begin with tearful and angry departures. We regurgitate our food and retrieve things from the rubbish. The narrator cannot believe this, it is all so desperately odd to him.

So now the question is, what does all this add? Is it worth it? On a basic level, this approach is excellent for making us pay attention. We need to read each conversation twice to really get the meaning. Various transactions are involved here – whether for sex, for health, or anything else – and by shifting the transfers into reverse we pay more attention to what is actually going on, and whether it makes sense. It is also used for humour, although not in a particularly exciting way. The narrator complains that Odilo checks out women by beginning with their hair and face, and only then going to their body. We, however, are winkingly aware that Odilo is far less chaste than such a sequence assumes. There is also the way that he seems to gain all of his strength for the day by absorbing excrement each morning from the toilet.

But its primary purpose is to confuse our moral compass. Doctors hurting their patients seems bizarre, especially when they are paid for it. People regret things, and then do them anyway. Relationships begin badly, but end with the sweetest of romances. This just doesn’t make sense, as our narrator never tires of telling us. It doesn’t make sense until Auschwitz. There, the doctor is at last healing people. Thousands of thousands of people are created in gas chambers and furnaces, or brought back to life on electric fences, or given miraculous life-giving injections. As the narrator remarks innocently, this is the only thing he has yet seen where things actually make sense.

This could have been extremely tasteless, and it’s a testament to Time’s Arrow’s quality that it is not. The absence of anything but positive judgement on the part of the narrator coupled with our own absolutely certain knowledge of what is truly taking place successfully amplifies a horror that is already almost unbearable to the imagination:

“There they go, to the day’s work, with their heads bent back. I was puzzled at first but now I know why they do it, why they stretch their throats out like that. They are looking for the souls of their mothers and fathers, their women and their children, gathering in the heavens – awaiting human form and union… the sky above the Vistula is full of stars. I can see them now. They no longer hurt my eyes.”

The scenes in Auschwitz are the highlight of the book, if we can call it that. Everything is so repugnant, but also so impactful thereby. The breakdown (or build-up) of Odilo’s relationship to his wife and his childhood are all that remains. Here there is not much excitement. Odilo suffers from impotency relating to his systematic murder of undesirable people, and chronologically before that also develops strange sexual proclivities. This affection for sadism and domination in the bedroom is something Odilo shares with Hanna in The Reader. As we go back, Odilo simply becomes less and less interesting as a character, as Amis seemingly decided he needed to tick off the serial-killer-psycho trait list just in case readers did not believe Odilo could actually have done the things he does.

Not that Odilo was ever very interesting. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everyone else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers.” Basically, he’s one of those brutes Adorno complains of in “The Meaning of Working through the Past” and elsewhere.

Yet that’s not entirely true. We still have the entire first part of Time’s Arrow, set in America. This can’t all be for nothing. Armed with a lot of gold, taken from the dead Jews, Odilo uses contacts in the priesthood to get himself into New York and set himself up there as a real doctor, the type which heals. In these conversations we get a brief view of Odilo’s heart, which is otherwise well-hidden from us: “I have sinned, Father… I still want to heal, Father. Perhaps, that way, by doing good…” So now we have a motive which sits fairly uneasily with the sheer scale of the horrors that Odilo is guilty of. He has had a change of heart. One which comes about only after his camp is set upon by the Soviets, and his family has abandoned him.

In another passage, earlier in the book, when Odilo has to leave New York, he says to his helper “all I ever wanted to do was help people.” This is quite frankly a load of bollocks. It may be true of his time in the States, but it would require extreme mental contortions to consider the administration of lethal poisons in concentration camps “helping”. And because we so rarely hear Odilo speak, and certainly never get into his mind, this approach – where we explore Odilo’s delusions – simply cannot work. As it stands, such statements just make him look a bit silly.

I am a big fan of redemption narratives, of course – it is the religious side of me. But Time’s Arrow cannot be this because we meet Odilo at his end first, and it is impossible to say whether he actually expiated his guilt or not. He donates money to the church, helps prostitutes, and has healed thousands of Americans. Whether we consider that adequate to washing away the sins of Auschwitz is a personal question. As for whether Odilo himself feels that he has worked through it all, without access to his head, it’s impossible to say for certain. All we get are occasional visions of a man who feels shame, who seeks crowds to “shed[…] the thing he often can’t seem to bear: his identity.”

All of this is to say that the decision to go through this narrative backwards both works and doesn’t. It makes us stop and slow down, and it certainly enhances the horror of that central topic – the systematised slaughter of Jews, those with disabilities, and all-too-many others – by portraying it in a way that makes it seem so morally positive. On the other hand, it takes the weight out of nearly everything else. Odilo’s relationships all end badly, so we cannot really enjoy them while they last – there can be no hope, after all, that this time he’ll crack it. As for his guilt, once we know his secret, we cannot really assess whether he feels like he’s successfully redeemed himself or not. Learning that he was hit as a child or mistreated Jews while at school adds nothing except reasons to dislike the person we are stuck with.

The narrator says, in the novel’s final words, “I… came at the wrong time – either too soon, or after it was all too late”. Earlier, he had remarked about his situation, how he had “(effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to exercise it.” We might think about how all of this relates to the question of guilt. We, too, are in the narrator’s position. As readers, we can only perceive guilt, but never rectify it or prevent the actions that led to its coming. Especially in this story, where everything is so deterministic. Why, then, do we continue to read about these things? Perhaps because, in questions of guilt and responsibility, which are among the most important ones we may face in our own lives, the more approaches to these problems we have, the more likely it is that we may be able to do whatever it is we must to save our own souls.