Subject: TIME'S ARROW by Martin Amis

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C Leeper +1 908 957 2070)
Date: 9 Mar 92 22:02:12 GMT

TIME'S ARROW by Martin Amis
                        A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
			 Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper

        Tod T. Friendly, John Young, Hamilton de Souza, Odilo Unverdorben.  Or
   should it be Odilo Unverdorben, Hamilton de Souza, John Young, Tod
   T. Friendly?  Because in TIME'S ARROW, the one person is inhabited by a soul
   living backwards in time.

        This idea is not new in science fiction (or is it fantasy?  Stephen
   Hawking discussed the scientific basis for time reversal in A SHORT HISTORY
   OF TIME, so I'll call it science fiction).  Philip K. Dick did it years ago
   with COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD.  But Dick's premise was not as tightly thought
   through--though people start conversations with "Goodbye" and end with
   "Hello," in between the conversation seems to go from what we would consider
   start to finish, and so on.  Amis is much more precise: though he does in
   general spell each speaker's lines in the normal English fashion, the lines
   are given in what we would call last first (e.g., answer, then question)
   order.

        All this sounds somewhat frivolous.  But Amis is not being frivolous.
   Unverdorben turns out to be (have been?) a doctor in Auschwitz and part--but
   only part--of what Amis is doing is showing how much of life and our
   existence makes more sense when lived backward.  Ecologically, for example,
   turning cars into iron ore and replacing it in the earth has a certain
   appeal that going in the other direction lacks.  And clearly the Holocaust
   makes more sense run backwards than forwards.  Many authors and philosophers
   have tried to make sense of the Holocaust and, while it's not clear that
   Amis's approach provides any practical answers, it does highlight how the
   Holocaust may be the archetypal example of humanity's tendency to do
   precisely the reverse of what makes sense.  Conversely, of course, the
   normal function of a doctor (Tod T. Friendly's profession) makes more sense
   forward than backward.  So in both our timeline and the reverse Tod
   T. Friendly (a name chosen with great care by Amis) moves from sin/evil to
   redemption--in a sense, anyway, though the actual situation is far more
   complex.

        None of this description, of course, conveys the richness of ideas or
   the poetry of words in TIME'S ARROW.  It is far and away the best science
   fiction novel of 1991 I have read and at the top of my Hugo nominees list.

   %T      Time's Arrow
   %A      Martin Amis
   %C      New York
   %D      1991
   %I      Harmony Books
   %O      hardback, US$18
   %G      ISBN 0-517-58515-4
   %P      165pp

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 908 957 2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or [email-masked]