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.