Time's Arrow

Martin Amis, best known for his novel London Fields, is a master of postmodern absurdity. Time's Arrow exemplifies just how weird the written word can be: Amis' narrator is a second consciousness alive in the mind of a doctor whose life runs exactly in reverse. In fact, the entire world runs exactly in reverse. Romantic relationships begin with a huge fight. Patients leave the hospital with massive, life-threatening injuries. Conversations are flipped. People literally walk backwards. However, Time's Arrow is not just a lofty exercise in absurdism; it becomes an investigation of the politics and eugenics employed by Nazi Germany. Of interest is the intertextual relationship Amis creates with the prevalent themes in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

The good life, at least, is better than the bad life."

"Something isn't quite working: this body I'm in won't take orders from this will of mine. Look around, I say. But his neck ignores me. His eyes have their own agenda. Is it serious? Are we okay? I didn't panic."

"I don't quite recognize this world we're in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it."
"The mad are said to keep a film or stage set in their heads, which they order and art-decorate and move through."

"I drag myself out of bed each night to start the day..."

"We sit in lines and worship a corpse."

"It's all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation...is easy, is quick."

"The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth's exiled or demoted soul."

"Destruction--is difficult. Destruction is slow."

"The buildings around here are right down on their knees. That's evidently the thing with the contemporary city. You might want to work in it. But no one is seriously expected to live in it. Content, meaning and content, are all stored uptown, in the notched pillars of the skyscrapers."

"Personally, I think we can dismiss suicide as a hollow threat. I've been thinking about it. Suicide isn't an option, is it. Not in this world. Once you're here, once you're on board, you can't get off. You can't get out."

"I know how people disappear. Where do they disappear to? Don't ask that question. Never ask it. It's none of your business."

"It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay."

"Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles can change."

"Why aren't people happier about how great they're feeling, relatively? Why don't we hug each other all the time, saying, 'How about this?'"

"The voice of conscience. It speaks in a whisper. Nobody hears it."

"I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked--and still get no further forward."

"Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven't even got skin over them."

"One man, one woman: I think we owe this to the human body."

"Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are."

"The premise for alcohol abuse, one gathers, is that consciousness, or selfhood, or corporeality, is intolerable. But it is intolerable. Certainly when you're chockful of gangrene. Here is comes again, consciousness, weary, multiform, intolerable."

"Consciousness isn't intolerable. It is beautiful: the eternal creation and dissolution of mental forms."

"At such times, I conclude, the soul can only hang in the dark, like a white bat, and let darkness have the day. Beneath, the body does what it does, in mechanical exertions of will and sinew, while the soul waits."

"The fact that a woman's body has a head on top of it isn't much more than a detail."

"They are reconciling themselves to their own mortality. They are doing what we all have to do down here on earth: they are getting ready to die."

"I'm being immature. I've got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn't. It won't. Ever."

"Maybe you're doomed in the heart, as they say, and you're never over your first love."

"Everyone smokes and drinks and messes around. No one works out."

"They were in bed together at the time, staring sadly at the ceiling. Then one thing led to another."

"For to me the stars are motelike, just twists of dust. Yet I feel their fire. How they burn my sight."

"I'm tired of being human."

"Now and then, when the night sky is starless, I look up and form the hilarious suspicion that the world will soon start making sense."

"There is a growing coldness in the household. Emotion is retreating from it. This is how things should be."

"I might be impressed and affected by this sudden talent for suffering, if it weren't for its monotony: fear, just fear, fear only."

"Hier ist kein warum. Here there is no why. Here there is no when, no how, no where."

"The dead look so dead. Dead bodies have their dead body language. It says nothing."

"Well, we cry and twist and are naked at both ends of life. We cry at both ends of life, while the doctor watches."

"The truth was the last thing I was ready for."

"Human beings want to be alive. They are dying to be alive."

"The future always comes true."