"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards," Kierkegaard has written. Martin Amis, in his quirky novel Time’s Arrow , reverses the dictum—he presents a life lived backwards, but capable of comprehension only when viewed forwards.
A life told backwards possesses a strange, unexpected coherency. And here is the strangest part: it seems to follow the same milestones as an ordinary forward-looking existence—it usually starts in a hospital with medical personnel in attendance, but the patient is totally helpless and weak, only gradually gaining speech, learning to walk and other skills we so often take for granted.
Here’s Martin Amis’s description from the opening page of Time’s Arrow :
"I move forward, out of the blackest sleep, to find myself surrounded by doctors…American doctors: I sense their vigour, scarcely held in check, like the profusion of their body hair and the forbidding touch of their forbidding hands—doctor’s hands, so strong, so clean, so aromatic. Although my paralysis was fairly well complete, I did find that I could move my eyes…"
And just as life begins in innocence, but perhaps tainted with a hidden original sin, the protagonist of Time’s Arrow starts his backward journey in time—literally rising from the dead—with an appearance of moral probity and respectability that scarcely conceals an anxious, hidden sense of guilt. His name is Tod Friendly—or at least it seems to be: our narrator’s identity changes several times as he gets younger and younger. These shifting aliases add to our sense that the book’s protagonist has something to hide or someone to hide from.
Amis relies on an interesting narrative twist here. His main character is living life backwards, but without free will—he cannot control the path on which his existence is receding towards youth and eventual birth. Nor does he remember his historical past, which in this topsy-turvy story now has become an unknowable sequence of events he is retracing in reverse. Mr. Friendly realizes that a dark cloud surrounds his youth, and he is racing to confront it— but its horrifying particulars are obscure even as they loom over his every move.
This is a bleak, sometimes brutal book — but for Martin Amis, such considerations are not incompatible with humor, although often of the darkest kind. His observations of a backward-led life veer between slapstick and philosophical reflection.
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"'Your driving days are over.' So said the mechanic in his oily dungarees. So said the hospital orderly in his stark white smock. But they were wrong. On the contrary, our driving days have just begun….When people move—when they travel—they look where they've come from, not where they’re going. Is that what human beings always do?…You have five reverse gears and only one for forward, which is marked ‘R’ for reverse. When we drive, we don’t look where we’re going. We look where we came from. There are accidents, sure, and yet it all works out.”
But affairs of the heart are even more puzzling than these automotive antics. When seen in rewind mode, relationships begin with fights and breakups, and then move backward through intimate familiarity, and finally end up with the two parties as total strangers, unaware of each other’s name. "By the time I’ve become really fond of them and their pretty ways, they will start to recede, irreversibly, fading from me, with the lightest of kisses, the briefest squeeze of the hand….They’ll be fobbing us off with the flowers and the chocolates. Oh yes. I’ve been there. Then, one day, they just look right through you."
A bemused detachment permeates Time’s Arrow , one that imparts a haphazard quality to the humorous elements that constantly come into play. Imagine the jokes you and your friends would make if you gathered to watch a movie in reverse. Susan Sontag once stated that all tragedies turn into comedies if you speed up the action sufficiently, but I would add the corollary that dramas are transformed into farce if you view them while they are slowly rewinding. Have you ever seen the young Woody Allen’s directorial debut, a low budget oddity called What ' s Up Tiger Lily? —it’s a film built on a real a Japanese spy movie that Allen butchers by imposing his own poorly dubbed dialogue on to the action. Amis sometimes achieves a similar comic distance in this novel; his narrator doesn't really live his life, but merely offers us his own rambling commentary as it hobbles along in reverse according to rules beyond his comprehension.
But this comic detachment coexists uneasily with the horrific historical undercurrents that eventually overwhelm and define our protagonist’s life. One might think that a life presented as a sequence of events outside the narrator’s control would be exempt from issues of guilt and complicity, but Amis is on to something different here—and something profound. He wants to capture a person's sense of his own life when he becomes a spectator rather than an actor. The result is one of the quirkiest novels of its day, and an unsettling synthesis of incompatible theologies, one in which both predestination and redemption by works and intentions equally have their sway. And what seems merely, at first glance, a flamboyant narrative device, turns into a powerful tool in laying bare hard truths and painful realities that would remain hidden in a more conventional tale. You will walk away convinced that time’s arrow always stings, but perhaps even more painfully when you’re looking in the wrong direction.