For some reason a novel I read 20 years ago popped into my consciousness and I thought I’d recommend it, and ask if Martin Amis has written other good novels.
Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence, published 1991, by Martin Amis. Wikipedia has a fine article on the book, but even the first sentence is a “spoiler” and the novel might be better read unspoiled. The peculiar narrative trick becomes evident right away. In Wikipedia’s words
For example, the peculiar narrator tells us how his host goes to the toilet, shit flies up into his bowels and turns into food which the host later removes from his mouth, packages, and takes to the grocery store to exchange for money!!
But the novel isn’t about the amusing aspects of this reversed-time sense.
Starting with this reverse narration as a device, I wonder what different authors would make out of it. Was Amis’ use of the device especially well conceived?
I thought the device worked well. All that irony, about an old doctor in the US making people and then “later”, as a young Nazi, making them well…it sounds like it could be corny or repetitive, but I though it was effective.
His collection of essays with an anti-nuclear-weapons theme, Einstein’s Monsters, is good. Some would say it’s outdated (it was written in the 1980s), but they’re sadly mistaken.
I tried to enjoy his novel London Fields, but it didn’t do it for me.
I love Time’s Arrow and how it uses that structure to reveal more about the narrator’s past. Kind of a book version of Memento, but dealing with different subject matter (i.e., not about a hard-boiled murder mystery, like M).
Amis is a great writer, but…provocative. I read a number of his books after TA, but didn’t find them nearly as satisfying, but I did end up respecting him as a writer…
I meant to write “I thought the device worked well. All that irony, about an old doctor in the US making people** sick**, and then “later”, as a young Nazi, making them well.”
I just finished Money by Martin Amis and loved it! (Please don’t ask me what the “moral” of the story was, however.)
My approach to book buying is randomly meandering through a bookstore, usually getting more non-fiction than fiction; I stumbled on this Amis novel and of course remembered his name from Time’s Arrow.
On future bookstore visits I’m heading directly to the Fiction Author=Amis section.
“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.”
As far as I know, the first person to use the “person living backwards” trope was Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass, where, IIRDC, it’s the White Queen who lives backwards. T.H. White used it in The Once and Future King to explain how Merlin could have knowledge of the future. I personally think that actually living backwards would be so significantly weird that you couldn’t effectively function, but the idea is still interesting.
Related, but different, is the “aging backwards” trope, where the character gets younger with pasing time, as in [ui]Benjamin Button*, or Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. The “youthening” people in those stories have no knowledge of the future, and are simply physically getting younger.
In Amis’ Time’s Arrow the consciousness with reverse time sense is just a passive narrator.
Perhaps I should have started a different thread for Amis’ Money. Googling now, I see that this novel from 1984 made a Best 100 List and was made into a 2010 BBC TV movie.
I seldom like novels (except good escapist crime thrillers). I don’t know if that enhances or diminishes my recommendation of Money. :dubious:
