Is Time’s Arrow Science Fiction?

By Geoff Nelder

I knew this question would be raised at TEBS* last night. Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis was my choice of book for the May book group meeting. The novel is about a former Nazi doctor, who’d heinously assisted Josef Mengele in experimenting and killing in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp during the second world war. Jews, political prisoners, trade union leaders, the mentally-deficient and gypsies were mass murdered there. You’d expect such a novel to be full of the horrors of that holocaust and of the efforts and guilt trips (maybe) of the doctor as he made a new life for himself after fleeing Poland to the Americas. What makes this novel different, however, is that the narrator is the consciousness, the soul of the doctor and is told BACKWARDS. The story begins on the death bed of the doctor, but the reader only knows what his consiouscness hears and sees. The time travels backwards including speech and people walking, etc but the brain adapts, and it is all that the narrator knows so it is ‘normal’ although he has a feeling it isn’t right.

Amis employs reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation in many places. As a writer I find this more amusing than Amis intended. His use of these techniques is likely to be aimed at creating abnormality and disruption for the reader. A recurrent themes in the novel is the narrator’s frequent misinterpretation of events. He accepts that people wait for an hour in a physician’s waiting room after being examined, although at some points he has doubts about this tradition. Relationships are portrayed with stormy beginnings that slowly fade into pleasant romances.

As another reviewer (Wikipedia) pointed out, “In the reversed version of reality, not only is simple chronology reversed (people become younger, and eventually become children, then babies, and then re-enter their mothers’ wombs, where they finally cease to exist) but so is morality. Blows heal injuries, doctors cause them. Theft becomes donation, and vice versa. In a passage about prostitutes, doctors harm them while pimps give them money and heal them. When the protagonist reaches Auschwitz, however, the world starts to make sense. A whole new race is created.”

 

Consider this example of reversed dialogue: “You could run them any way you liked – and still get no further forward”.

“‘You’re very special to me.’

‘Like hell.’

‘But I love you.’

‘I can’t look you in the eye.’

‘Please. You can sleep over.’

‘This is goodbye, Tod.'”

 

Is this forwards, or backwards? It’s both and I love this kind of wordplay. However, not everyone in the book group appreciates it. Obviously it takes the reader out of the fictive dream, where the author is supposed to be invisible. Yes, for those handful of examples you need to read the page then flick your eyes back up to re-read in order to get the most out of it. Many readers either won’t do that or resent it but it is often the case with literary novels to gain optimum appreciation. I am reminded of Pincher Martin by William Golding not just because it requires several readings to absorb all the nuances but, like Time’s Arrow, the whole narrative takes place in the dying moments of the main character.

 

One of the best aspects of science fiction is its defiance of rigid definitions. Early works were hard science fiction where robots, rockets and flying saucers invaded Earth or used to explore space. Time travel, faster-than-light and aliens were all around in H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and considered as science fiction. Where we have giant and miniature humans as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1725) then we are in fantasy. Not that he thought much about genre. If anything Swift considered his masterpiece to be a parody of the growing middle-class fashion of reading travellers’ tales as well as a satire on people’s foibles. Vampire tales kicked off by Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) are fantasy because no amount of reasonable projection of current knowledge would create a vampire. It’s easy to classify pixies, dungeons & dragons, and goblins as fantasy – beyond scientific knowledge. Many tales are borderline. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818 / 1831) is well within current knowledge, give or take a transplant and a defibrillator; hence it is science fiction.

As a rough guide, science fiction could be said to be fiction, which stretches current knowledge. Fantasy is pure imagination.

I confess to kick against prescriptive definitions. There is Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.” No arguments there.

Robert Blevins publisher of Adventure Books of Seattle favours Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame, who once said: ‘Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible…’ Science Fiction derived its name from the early days of the genre when the stories involved rockets, fantastic machinery, robots, astronomy, new phenomenon and lots more science. Now it can still have those and be very enjoyable too, but more so we relish the improbable coming to credibility in stories, and still label it as science fiction.

I also like Tom Shippey’s definition of science fiction: “Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.” That bit about change is significant. The huge element of ‘what if’ makes exciting fiction. What if gravity was random in strength and direction? What if time travelled backwards in the consciousness of a dying man? I rest my case that Time’s Arrow is science fiction.

*TEBS = The Esoteric Bibliophilia Society: or booze and science fiction / fantasy book group in Chester.

Geoff Nelder is the British co-editor at Adventure Books of Seattle – a small press publisher of science fiction, true life, and adventurous fiction.

Even so I have to return to a valid test of good stories posed by Nick in our book group: What is the story here? Reduce it to one line and have we something of intrigue or have I just been mesmerised by the style? Take away the plot device of running the story backwards and is it just another holocaust story? Maybe but to me the reversing of time is far more than just a device to make readers engage with a difference perspective. For one thing the consciousness has no awareness of the historical significance (unlike the reader) of what he is about to witness at Auschwitz. The tone is light, humorous although there’s awareness that when the weather and fire creates people who become better and return to their homes on cattle wagon, something is not right. The reader, already traumatized by their own knowledge of the gas chambers and ovens, is double hit by the horror that the consciousness thinks the opposite of bad is happening. One of our members, John, is more shocked by the doctor’s bestial, brutal behaviour to his wife. Beating her and making her do housework while naked. But the consciousness doesn’t see beating in the same way. A person starts black and blue and becomes healthy when a hand hits them. Doubly shocking to us, not to him. Then there’s entropy. The reversal or deconstruction of order is suggested in this reversal of time. I don’t know if that was the intention and I’ve seen it mentioned before though I’m not entirely buying it. A reversal of time doesn’t necessarily create random, chaos out of order, or does it?

Just over half the group enjoyed reading Time’s Arrow but I’m glad I chose it. Anything to make thinking outside the box is good, or to make thinking inverted within the box is good too.

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