1
The son of Kingsley Amis, a writer who began his literary life
- with John Osborne and John Wain - as one of the Angry Young
Men, Martin Amis outstripped his father's reputation for offending
the literary niceties of his day with his first novel, The
Rachel Papers (1973). Amis was twenty four when the book appeared
to admiring reviews. Many of the features that characterize Amis's
subsequent fiction are already discernible in this book - its
scatalogical and satiric treatment of sex, its comic description
of the indignities of bodily life (spots, smells, toilet habits,
sexual infection and the like), and above all its inventive deployment
of language. The protagonist and narrator is Charles Highway who
spends the last five hours of his nineteenth year reading over
his diaries covering the last year of his adolescence, a year
in which he manages to seduce Rachel and gain entry to Oxford
University. The diaries reveal a representative cool young man
of the swinging early 1970s. What is distinctive about the book
is its infatuation with the primacy of writing over experience.
Experience only becomes real for Charles when it is written down.
He prefers reading about his doings of the last year to spending
time with Rachel. She has been subdued by stratagems already recorded
in one of his many notebooks, Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis
(the use of italics forming its own comment on Charles' literary
pretentiousness). The novel ends: "I refill my pen."
The novelist's transformation of life into text is far from over.
Although Martin Amis (born in 1949) was brought up in a literary
household, he records that he never read anything more serious
than science fiction until his father's second wife, the writer
Elizabeth Jane Howard, took him in hand in his mid teens and encouraged
him to start reading some of the classics of English literature.
By then he had passed his early childhood in South Wales where
his father was still struggling to make ends meet, spent a year
at Princeton where his father taught creative writing, left for
Majorca with his mother at the age of twelve after his parents
separated, and got kicked out of his grammar school in Battersea
on their return to London for absenting himself to appear in the
film A High Wind in Jamaica. Altogether he attended about
fourteen schools and only won a place at Exeter College, Oxford
University, by attending a number of crammers that taught him
enough Latin and other required subjects to meet the entry requirements.
A late developer, he left Oxford in 1971 with a formal First.
Thereafter his career was characterized by early success. He became
an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement
in 1972, literary editor for the New Statesman in 1976
at the age of twenty seven, and a special writer for the Observer.
By 1979 in addition to The Rachel Papers he had published
two more widely reviewed novels, Dead Babies (1975) and
Success (1978), and became a full-time writer.
Amis established himself as a comic writer with his first novel,
but a comic writer whose subject is not the traditional subject
of comedy. Charles Highway speaks for his author when he observes:
"Surely, nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny.
The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets" (91). Martin
Amis appears to be deliberately staking out territory that is
unlike that of his father's (Lucky Jim) Dixon who claims that
"nice things are nicer than nasty ones." For his younger
generation the world had deteriorated so much in two decades that
the only possible subject for contemporary comedy was material
considered fitter for tragic treatment in his father's time and
before. "I'm not really in search of the sordid," Amis
has said. Modern life "just is sordid" (Bragg). Prior
to recording his first attempt at seducing Rachel, one that has
to be aborted when Rachel announces that she is not on the pill,
Charles Highway prepares his reader for the coming anti-romantic
outcome: The final kiss we associate with the conclusion of Shakespearean
comedies "is now the beginning of the comic action [. . .].
We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond
the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths
[. . .]" (154). For Amis both relationships and the globe
itself are in decay. The only available response for a writer
who was born, as he has pointed out, four days before the Russians
successfully exploded their first atom bomb and inaugurated the
era of nuclear deterrence, is comic (Einstein's Monsters
1). However, he is interested not in light comedy, but in "a
wincing laughter, or a sort of funky laughter [. . .]. Sort of
a hung-over laughter, where it hurts" (Morrison 96).
Many of the stylistic characteristics that have come to be associated
with postmodernist writing flow naturally from this conjunction
of matter and generic treatment. His matter is ready-made - the
sordid, ugly, threatening phenomenon of late capitalist Western
civilization, a dying world in which love is also in its death-throws.
This view radically affects every aspect of his writing - not
just its grotesque content, but his attitude to fiction, his rejection
of realism, especially psychological realism, his exuberant use
of figurative language, his punning allusiveness and his belief
in the moral power of language used creatively. For Amis writing
is "black fun" (Ross 24). The modern understanding of
comedy enables him to laugh at characters in his novels who "aren't
just ridiculous but hideous and sinister" (Bragg). His characters
are ostensibly manipulated, frequently by an author figure incorporated
in the novel. He dismisses motivation as "a shagged out force
in modern life." "I have enough of the postmodernist
in me [. . .] to want to remind the reader that it is no use getting
het-up about a character, since the character is only there to
serve the fiction" (Haffenden 19). Amis encourages the reader
to identify with the author of his fiction, not with any of the
characters. He is constantly surprised when readers admit to feeling
sympathy for one of his more horrific creations such as Keith
in Dead Babies (1991).
He is in full flight from what he calls "the typical English
novel [. . .]. 225 sanitized pages about the middle classes"
(Stout 35). His imagination is more excited by the savage contrast
in wealth and cultural values that prevails between the British
upper and lower classes. His third novel, Success, describes
the diametrically opposing fortunes of a wealthy aristocrat and
his lower class step brother. The latter's ultimate success in
business and bed acts as an ironic commentary on the changing
relationships between the classes in late seventies Britain when
the trades unions appeared to control the government and the country.
In his fourth novel, Other People. A Mystery Story (1981),
Mary Lamb, the female protagonist suffering from amnesia, is made
to experience an upward journey through contemporary circles of
hell, starting with beggars (one of whom forcibly has sex with
her) and ending with her (sexual) victimization of an upper class
philanthropist. In this book Prince, the narrator, is also the
protagonist's demon-lover and murderer (the Prince of Darkness?).
Both narrator and murderer have the power to end Mary's existence.
Here Amis gives fictional expression to his conviction that "the
author is not free of sadistic impulses. But," he goes on,
"it isn't real sadism," because as an author he does
not grant any character in his books the reality he accords real
people (Haffenden 12). Amis has also made his anti-realist use
of time in his fiction more extreme in this novel. It ends as
it begins with Mary's awakening into life or death - it is hard
to say which in this unconventional mystery story. The entire
novel can be seen as a single instant in which her life is reenacted
before her murder.
Amis has always put language before realist considerations. Even
the names he gives to many of his characters contribute to the
primacy he places on language over psychological naturalism. In
Other People Mary Lamb is both the innocent of the nursery
rhyme, innocent also like Charles Lamb's mad sister, while her
previous malevolent identity as Amy Hide suggests that Amy hides
her past in Mary (almost an anagram), just as Stevenson's villainous
Mr Hyde hides in Dr Jekyll. Amis's delight in onomastics is given
full rein in his subsequent novels, as is his conjuring with literary
allusion which he employs creatively and mischievously. In Success
the upper class Gregory opens his diary entry for April (the
novel consists of the diary entries of each step brother for the
twelve months of one year) with an ironic allusion to T.S. Eliot's
already ironically allusive opening to The Waste Land :
"April is the coolest month for people like myself. Down
comes the roof of my ritzy green car. Out burgeons my spring wardrobe.
I have a £20 haircut" (92). Amis's use of "cool"
and "ritzy" places his fiction at as a great a distance
from Eliot's "cruelest month" as that is from Chaucer's
"showres soote."
The opposite of his father, Martin Amis considers a plain sentence
to be so much wasted opportunity. His father blames the influence
of Nabokov on his son for what he calls the "terrible compulsive
vividness in his style" (Michener 142). Certainly the son
is indebted to Nabokov (especially to Despair ), as he
is to Saul Bellow, the only writer to warrant two essays in The
Moronic Inferno (1986), his collection of journalistic pieces
written about the United States mainly for the Observer.
But Amis's at times dazzling manipulation of language - often
seen when addressing some of the more revolting aspects of human
behavior - is uniquely his own. Reviewers unfairly attributed
his depiction of the consciousness of Mary, the amnesiac in Other
People, to the influence of Craig Raine's "A Martian
Sends a Postcard Home." In fact Amis began this novel a year
before the poem appeared. Some of the effects he achieves are
quite stunning. Mary's first encounter with children is typical:
"they were shrunken, impacted - mysteriously lessened in
some vital aspect. They limped in pairs [. . .]. Some were so
bad now that they had to be wheeled round in covered boxes, protesting
piteously to their guides [. . .]" (16). Amis achieves a
similarly powerful impact when describing a tramp's sexual assault
on her: "His two wet red points wanted to get as close as
they could to her, to get inside. His two tongues wanted her two
mouths" (42). That is a typical Amis effect - the use of
linguistic estrangement to take you into the (seeming) consciousness
of a character.
2
With the publication of Money. A Suicide Note (1984)
American as well as British critics began to see Amis as a major
force in contemporary fiction in the English-speaking world. As
the novel alternates between London and New York this might well
have been part of his intention. Money paints a consciously
caricatured portrait of New York. But it avoids adopting that
snide condescending stance towards everything American that so
many British writers inherit from their insular culture. In fact
London and New York become interchangeable centers of rampant
greed in the novel. This is the America of Reagan's deficit-making
spending spree and the Britain of Thatcher's sale of state assets
such as the North Sea oil fields. In both countries the indigent
were being thrown onto the streets to swell the number of the
homeless. In both countries the rich were getting richer. In Money
Amis gives comic fictive life to one financial scam, although
this remains small scale compared to the S. and L. or junk bond
embezzlements that were concurrently being perpetrated. The novel
is set in 1981 and incorporates the Royal Wedding of Charles and
Diana, the inner city riots in England and the Polish military
coup as symbolic reminders of the new political climate of the
eighties. Amis thinks that "the money age we're living through
now is a short-term, futureless kind of prosperity [. . .], a
'live now, pay later' thing. Money is a more democratic medium
than blood, but money as a cultural banner--you can feel the whole
society deteriorating around you because of that" (Stout
36).
John Self, the narrator and protagonist of Money, is the
epitome of this era - a maker of outrageous television commercials,
brought up on junk culture, top of the pops, booze and pornography.
His only god is money. It proves a destructive god, which is why
Self (and Amis in the subtitle) calls Money a suicide note.
Amis has pointed out that "money is always connected with
excrement in myth" (Smith 79). Self mirrors the untramelled
self, the naked ego (and id), a bundle of appetites. All his actions
and relations with others are governed by money. His astonishing
consumption of alcohol is, Amis has explained, "more a painkiller
than a quest for a good time" (Haffenden 13). His onanistic
and pornographic sex life is the product of having seen too many
videos and soap operas and too many hardcore magazines, both of
which sell sex as a commodity. Describing sex with Selina, his
beautiful and faithless English girlfriend, Self writes: "While
making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that
dirty talk" (143). It turns out that Selina herself is marketing
her sexual appeal, and Self is not the highest bidder. He is consumed
by consumerism, cretinized by television. All of his sexual experiences
come already mediated by his immersion in the porn industry. Self
is a representative child of the eighties for whom money has to
compensate for a total absence of culture.
Since the entire book is narrated by Self this limitation in his
background, knowledge and sensibilities might have acted as a
severe curb on Amis's descriptive and linguistic potentialities.
The solution he adopted in the book is one first suggested to
him by Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. "Henderson,"
Amis has said, "has the most elaborate and poetic thoughts,
but every time he opens his mouth to speak, it's drivel"
(McGrath 190). At one point in the book Amis pays Bellow comic
homage when his producer offers Self a Rain King cocktail (24).
Amis has fun reducing life's polychrome complexities to Self's
monochrome vision: "While others look at art or read books
or surrender to serious music, my mind just razzes me about money,
Selina, hard-ons, the Fiasco. I'm trying, but that's trying too"
(301). Both trying is trying (taxing) and his mind is trying to
reimpose its debased values on him. The pun anticipates his failure
to enculturate himself. Amis also enjoys having Self describe
events as he erroneously sees them. Dead drunk at a media restaurant
in Manhattan, Self recalls, "I found a woman talking unhappily
into a telephone and tried to cheer her up and went on trying
even after her boyfriend or husband appeared from somewhere. I
disliked his tone. He hurt my feelings. We had an altercation
that soon resolved itself with me lying face down in a damp bed
of cardboard boxes [. . .]" (175). Even in the descriptive
portions of the book Amis will incorporate literary references
of which Self is unaware but which cannot help catching the reader's
attention:
And one, and two, and three, and four. I'm lying on the fourteenth
floor of the Ashberry, wearing tagglebag only and wiggling my
legs in the air like an upended beetle. What am I doing? I'm exercising[.
. .]This is the new-deal me. This is my metamorphosis. (312).
Unlike Self we hear the allusion to Kafka's Metamorphosis
and compare Self's "improved" state as a beetle to Gregor's
deterioration in the same circumstances.
Amis has defended his technique of providing characters of severely
limited perceptions with poetic thoughts by citing V.S. Pritchett's
claim that ordinary people are filled with extraordinary, magical
thoughts, but that they have no vocabulary with which to express
them (Haffenden 8-9). Ultimately Amis chooses to fly in the face
of realism. His antipathy to the whole concept of motivation becomes
part of the book itself. Fielding Goodney, the American producer
of the projected movie, Money, has Self unknowingly finance
the entire hoax operation. Why? For no good reason. As a practical
joke. After discovering the truth Self worries away at Fielding's
motivation. The character, Martin Amis, dismisses Self's demand
for a motive: "It hasn't got what it takes to motivate people
any more" (331). Later he adds: "it's an idea taken
from art, not from life, not from twentieth-century life"
(341). On the penultimate page Self takes up the argument: "I've
settled the motivation question. I supplied it all. The confidence
trick would have ended in five minutes if it hadn't been for John
Self. I was the key. I was the needing, the hurting artist. I
was the wanting artist" (362). What he wanted was confidence,
the confidence that a large bank balance is supposed to offer.
And confidence is something Amis considers to be "a wildly
inappropriate response to present-day life" (Haffenden 5).
When Self draws the character "Martin Amis" into the
novel by asking him to rewrite the screenplay of his movie to
resolve the actors' conflicting demands while making them behave
realistically, "Martin Amis" replies: "we're pretty
much agreed that the twentieth century is an ironic age--downward-looking.
Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for
the twentieth century" (231). Amis's postmodern rejection
of classic realism then is closely related to his feeling that
the present era represents a deterioration in the quality of living.
This relation between the present age of late capitalism and its
cultural expression using anti-realist esthetic modes has been
extensively theorized by Fredric Jameson. Unlike Jameson and his
own father in his youth, Amis is no Marxist. His is nevertheless
a representative artistic response to the postmodern era. Both
cities between which the novel alternates show signs of irreversible
decay. There is "[b]lasted, totalled, broken-winded, shot-faced
London, doing time under sodden skies" (150) (the metaphors
building up an apocalyptic image of breakdown and entropy). New
York is characterized by its birds that, having "been processed
by Manhattan and the twentieth century," "have slipped
several links in the chain of being" (199). Money values,
Amis maintains, are responsible for having "turned paradise
into a toilet" (Morrison 102). How can realism afford the
contemporary writer an adequate response to the unreality of humankind's
collective madness?
By injecting a substitute author figure called "Martin Amis"
into the novel Amis is further distancing the reader from Self
and the insane lifestyle and values with which he is associated,
a distance needed for the satire to be effective. "Martin
Amis" lectures a bored Self on the way the modern antihero
is so removed from the author that "you can do what the hell
you like with him" (229). The most important function "Martin
Amis" performs in the plot is to re-write the screenplay
of Money so successfully that he foils Fielding's plan
of seeing Self torn apart by his outraged leading actors. The
irony of this development is that it only serves to prolong Self's
state of self-delusion. As in Other People, Amis confronts
his readers with their complicity in the author's sadistic treatment
of his main character. At the same time there is a similarity,
as he has pointed out, between the "lone gratification"
of Self's endless hand jobs and the writer's lone gratification
in subjecting his helpless protagonist to such humiliations. As
Karl Miller has written, the original Onan of Genesis "is
an orphan, and there are two of him" (411). "Martin
Amis" acts as Self's cultured alter-ego in London, just as
Martina Twain (a feminized twin to Martin?) performs the same
role for Self in New York.
Amis employs numerous puns and literary allusions to ironically
highlight the gap that separates Self and the world of money from
these two cultured alter-egos. One or two of these allusions become
more like recurrent thematic motifs. Take for example the allusions
to Othello. What possible relation can the events in this
novel have to Shakespeare's play? In the first place, the play
evokes a world that is patently inaccessible to Self. When Martina
takes him to the opera to see Otello Self congratulates
himself for knowing the plot from having seen the TV spinoff.
His understanding of the story however is a hilarious misinterpretation
that stems from the media stereotypes into which he automatically
turns the major figures: "The flash spade general arrives
to take up a position on some island, in the olden days there,
bringing with him the Lady Di figure as his bride. Then she starts
diddling one of his lieutenants, a funloving kind of guy whom
I took to immediately" (277). In no time Self has converted
Verdi's opera into a soap opera. To add insult to injury he identifies
with Cassio and assumes that Desdemona must be sleeping around
like the rest of the women in his life, especially Selina.
Amis keeps Othello in view throughout the book by such
devices as calling "Martin Amis's" car Iago, or having
Self take a swig from a bottle of Desdemona Cream. His father
works in a pub called the Shakespeare. In a climactic scene near
the end Self is waylaid by Fielding in drag. After he has delivered
a devastating kick to Fielding's jaw Self hears Fielding cry out,
"Oh damn dear go [. . .] Oh and you man dog" (322).
It takes the educated "Martin Amis" to explain to Self
that Fielding was in fact quoting Roderigo's accusatory words
directed at Iago after Iago has fatally stabbed him: "O damn'd
Iago, O inhuman dog." As "Martin Amis" remarks,
this is a remarkable piece of transference on Fielding's part,
since Fielding's relation to Self is like that of Iago's to Othello.
But Self is no Othello, as Amis has explained: "he's Roderigo,
the lecherous spendthrift and gull" (Haffenden 23). He is
a pawn that is forced to move at the cost of its own defeat, as
occurs in the chess game he loses to "Martin Amis" near
the end. "Martin Amis" explains the quotation from Othello
to Self towards the end of the game in which he, like Fielding,
"zugwangs" Self (i.e. forces him to move and lose).
It is ironically appropriate that Self mistakes "Martin Amis's"
reference to Iago to refer to "Amis's" old car, convinced
that if he wins the author will demand as his prize Self's Italian
sportscar, the Fiasco. The truth is that Martin Amis has - just
as much as Fielding - acted Iago to Self's Roderigo by subjecting
him to 360 pages of humiliation.
Amis's invention of a fictionalized alter-ego enables him to embed
the device of the intrusive author and his self-reflexive voice
firmly within the narrative structure. It is Self, the narrator,
not "Martin Amis," who is finally expelled from the
novel at its conclusion, expelled from the world of money that
has been his undoing. He is also typographically expelled from
the book. The final section of his narrative is in italics to
draw attention to the different Self to be found there living
his life in the present. While he thought he had money he saw
himself as an express train rushing through the night: "Though
travelling nowhere I have hurtled with blind purpose to the very
end of my time." He continues: "I want to slow down
now, and check out the scenery, and put in a stop or two. I want
some semi-colons" (288). In the final sentence of the book
describing the return from work of his new unpretentious girlfriend,
Georgina, Amis has allowed the first and only semi-colon in the
book to appear. It is a fittingly linguistic touch with which
to round off the narrative of a character so reliant for his fictive
existence on Amis's brilliant and witty manipulation of language.
3
Amis's next book was Einstein's Monsters (1987), a collection
of five short stories and a polemical introduction in which he
denounces the insanity of nuclear deterrence. The stories were
widely criticized for being no more than exempla of his stance
on nuclear weapons. His next long and ambitious novel, London
Fields (1989), is set in 1999 against a backdrop of imminent
planetary disaster (not specifically nuclear seeing that glasnost
had set in by the time he wrote this book) referred to throughout
as the Crisis. Its size and ambitious scope attracted wide attention
in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. Once again there is
a writer figure in the novel who in this case is dying from the
same causes as the Earth. The central character is Nicola Six
who seeks her own death by inducing one of two men - a wealthy
family man and a working class small-time criminal - to murder
her. As in Other People the author figure cannot escape
complicity in her murder. The novel is burdened by some of the
didactic content that marred Einstein's Monsters. Nicola's
death wish, for instance, is a direct consequence of the death
of love at the end of the century. Yet this novel rivals the ingenuity
and wit of Money whenever Amis abandons his high moral
tone. After these last two books reviewers were beginning to think
of Amis as a writer taken over by a moral platform - displaying,
as Martin Harris wrote unfairly in the New Statesman, "the
portentiousness of the reborn eco freak and the whine of the nuke
neurotic" (Harris 34).
Then Amis published Time's Arrow (1991) which restored
his reputation among critics and earned a nomination for the Booker
Prize. Taking as its central character a Nazi doctor who participated
in the horror of Auschwitz and then escaped to anonymity in America,
the book traces his life backwards from his death in the United
States from an automobile accident to his birth in Germany. This
is his only novel to take the past for its subject. The device
of reversing the flight of time's arrow is not original in itself.
It has been employed, for instance, by numerous science fiction
writers including Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.
But the audacious combination of reversing narrative chronology
so as to retell the story of the Holocaust is both unique and
strangely moving. It is bold enough for an Aryan to try and recount
this catastrophic event in the history of the Jews. But to render
it as the one healing episode in a senseless world by reversing
the order in which we experience life requires literary courage
and a command of language that Amis clearly has.
The Holocaust is, as Amis has said, "the central event of
the twentieth century" (Bellante 16). And the Nazi doctors'
role in the death camps was crucial. In an Afterword to the novel
Amis acknowledges his debt to his friend Robert Jay Lifton's book,
The Nazi Doctors. The perverse story it tells of an entire
profession adopting an ideology of killing as a means of healing
(their notion of ethnic cleansing striking chilling echoes in
the Serbian atrocities against Croatians, Bosnians and Albanians
in the 1990s) struck him as "the only story that would gain
meaning backwards" (Trueheart B1). By moving the narration
in the direction of the Holocaust Amis imparts to this novel the
same feeling of apocalypse that London Fields has set in
the Crisis of the near future. At the same time to reverse history
is to undo it, to return to the innocence of a time before the
European Fall - a common theme of Holocaust poetry.
To achieve both effects he introduces as the narrator of the book,
not the doctor, but his doppelganger, the doctor's soul, "the
soul he should have had," as Amis put it to one interviewer
(DeCurtis 146). It is a wholly fictional device that works for
the most part and contributes a terrible sense of irony to the
historical events we see unfolding in reverse. The doctor and
narrator share the same body but otherwise have different identities.
The narrator admits that he's slow on the uptake: "It may
very well be that I'm not playing with a full deck" (29).
He has no memory of the past as does the doctor. So when the doctor
seeks to lose his earlier identity the narrator observes: "My
presence is never tinier. But it's the same story. Render up your
soul, and gain power" (49). The doctor clearly abandoned
this "voice of conscience" (47) in the process of becoming
a doctor with the doctor's power of life and death over others.
Both his wife and later girlfriend tell him he has no soul. His
soul which comes to life, which is born at the moment of the doctor's
death on the first page of the book, is consequently essentially
child-like and innocent of the terrible dreams from which the
doctor suffers.
Those dreams act for both narrator and reader as anticipations
- the narrator talks of "the prophesy of my dreams"
(140), of "a terrible secret" he feels he is journeying
towards (5). But for the doctor they represent the past that haunts
him throughout the rest of his life. So for the narrator there
is something deterministic about the way he is forced to experience
the doctor's life in strict reverse. As he remarks, "Suicide
isn't an option, is it. Not in this world" (25). The doctor's
dreams begin on the second page with an image of a male shape
in a white coat and black boots. (Doctors preside over the novel,
"life's gatekeepers' (4), who give life to the protagonist
at the end of the book and deprive him of it at the beginning.)
"In his wake, a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm
of human souls" (8). The souls become stars in the night
sky, souls of babies with enormous power. Next come nightmares
featuring a wooden shed and implements. Amis is using the doctor's
nightmares to prepare the reader for the period late in the book
when he works at Auschwitz. The shed turns out to be Room 1 in
which prisoners are put to death by injection. The doctor's most
horrific dream occurs shortly before he regresses to the death
camp. "He dreams he is shitting human bones" (106).
The dreams are then replaced by the historical event, the mass
extermination of the Jews, played in reverse.
The way Amis makes use of the technique of narrative reversal
is responsible for the savage irony of this book. It is not surprising
that Time's Arrow has been compared to Swift's A Modest
Proposal, for it shares with that work an indignation that
is all the more powerful for its restraint. Amis maintains a comic
tone throughout, although it is "disgusted laughter"
he cultivates to "laugh the wicked off the stage" (Trueheart
B1-2). David Lehman called the novel "a fictional deconstruction
of time" in which history is undone (15). And time, according
to Amis, is linked to morality. "Almost any deed," Amis
has said, "any action, has its morality reversed, if you
turn time's arrow around" (DeCurtis 147). On reading The
Nazi Doctors, Amis realized that "[h]ere was a psychotically
inverted world, and if you did it backward in time, it would make
sense." (DeCurtis 146). The sea change that chronological
reversal has on causality and moral responsibility enables Amis
to defamiliarize an event the shock value of which has become
blunted by reiteration.
In fact it is the very playfulness with which he treats the horror
of the death camp that makes it strange, both linguistically,
in Shklovsky's definition of ostranenie, and narratively.
He spends the first two thirds of the novel acclimatizing the
reader to the looking glass world that the narrator inhabits.
In his inverted world fire and violence are creative. Earthquakes
erect cities in half an hour. Moral acts are reversed. And of
course this makes no kind of sense to him. The doctor's attempts
to compensate for his past by buying toys for kids on the street
when reversed becomes in the narrator's eyes a mean way of taking
toys from the children so as to cash them in at the store for
a couple of bucks. Kennedy's assassination is triumphantly transformed
into a hero's welcome on his return to life in the streets of
Dallas. The conversations of lovers told in reverse have an uncanny
way of reading just as satisfactorily as when recorded chronologically,
just as love affairs seem to work just as well recounted back
to front. The boat taking him from Europe to the States in its
inverted form leaves "no mark in the ocean, as if we are
successfully covering our tracks" (99), which is precisely
what the doctor was doing.
Above all there is the absurd reversal between the doctor's perfectly
ethical medical practice in the United States and his lethal medical
procedures at Auschwitz. In America he is called Tod Friendly.
"Tod" means "death" in German. Amis explains
his last name: "'Friendly' America, forgiving, forgetful
America" (Bellante 16). His German name is Odilo Unverdorben.
His surname in German means "uncorrupt, innocent," as
if original sin were undone. In the perplexed narrator's eyes
Dr Friendly performs disfavours to his American patients:
The babies get wheeled or carried in here, and they're well enough,
and you look them over and say something like "This little
fella's just fine." And you're always dead wrong. Always.
A day or two later the baby will be back, crimson-eared, or whoofing
with croup. And you never do a damn thing for them. (44)
By comparison Dr Unverdorben performs miraculous resuscitations
for his Jewish patients at Auschwitz. "Our preternatural
purpose? To dream a race" (120). They start off as corpses
stacked in the Chamber. "Entirely intelligibly, though, to
prevent needless suffering, the dental work was usually completed
while the patients were not yet alive" (121). Next the poison
gas is returned to the vents: "It was I, Odilo Unverdorben,
who personally removed the pellets of Zyklon B and entrusted them
to the pharmacist in his white coat" (121). After getting
dressed, they leave the Sprinkleroom and miraculously are rejoined
on the platform by their menfolk who have synchronistically "completed
their term of labour service" (123).
The deluded narrator is so happy at this late turn of events that
he begins to use the first person pronoun in this section when
describing Odilo's apparent acts of resuscitation. And yet ironically
the distance at this point between his and Odilo's moral vision
is at its maximum. Amis relies on three different perspectives
for this section to work. There is Odilo's perverted misinterpretation
of the Hippocratic oath. There is the naive narrator's celebration
of Odilo's seeming miracles of healing. And there is the modern
reader's sinking knowledge of what really went on at Nazi death
camps like Auschwitz. The reader, who is expected to identify
with the [implied] author, not the narrator, supplies the truth
and the tragedy, as Amis has explained (DeCurtis 146). David Lehman
has ingeniously suggested that in the Auschwitz section Amis is
appropriating the definitive motif of deconstruction - erasure:
"The very instrument of revisionist history is put to the
service of heartbreaking fiction" (15). Amis has said that
he came up with the technical device of narrational reversal before
finding the subject suited to this treatment. But Amis, a novelist
and not a theorist, is always "looking for [. . .] a way
to see the world differently" (Morrison 99). In Time's
Arrow he has brilliantly combined a postmodern use of narrative
defamiliarization with his recent insistence on the need for moral
vision. Powerfully imagined, savagely ironic, strangely moving,
the novel is a celebration of the fictive and of what the fictive
imagination can wrest from history.
Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. New York: Viking Penguin,
1961.
Amis, Martin. Dead Babies. New York: Vintage, 1991.
---. Einstein's Monsters. New York: Vintage, 1990.
---. London Fields. New York: Vintage, 1991.
---. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. New
York: viking Penguin, 1987.
---. Money. A Suicide Note. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
---. Other People. A Mystery Story. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin, 1982.
---. The Rachel Papers. New York: Knopf, 1974.
---. Success. New York: Vintage, 1991.
---. Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence. New York:
Harmony, 1991.
Bellante, Carl and John. "Unlike Father, Like Son. An Interview
with Martin Amis." The Bloomsbury Review 12. 2 (1992):
4-5, 16.
Bragg, Melvyn. The South Bank Show (Martin Amis). London
Weekend Television, 1989.
DeCurtis, Anthony. "Britain's Mavericks." Harper's
Bazaar Nov. 1991: 146-47.
Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview. London and New
York: Methuen, 1985. 1-24.
Harris, Martyn. "Pursuit of the Millenium." New Statesman
and Society 2. 68 (1989): 34.
Lehman, David. "From Death to Birth." New York Times
Book Review 17 Nov. 1991: 15.
McGrath, Patrick. "Martin Amis." Bomb 18 (1987).
Rpt. in Bomb Interviews. Ed. Betty Sussler. San Francisco:
City Light Books, 1992. 187-97.
Michener, Charles. "Britain's Brat of Letters." Esquire
106 (1986): 136-42.
Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. New
York: Oxford UP, 1985.
Morrison, Susan. "The Wit and the Fury of Martin Amis."
Rolling Stone 17 May1990: 95-102.
Ross, Jean W. "CA Interview" (with Martin Amis). Contemporary
Authors: New Revision Series. 27 (1987): 23-5.
Smith, Amanda. :Martin Amis (PW Interviews)." Publishers
Weekly 8 Feb. 1985: 79.
Stout, Mira. "Down London's Mean Streets." New York
Times Magazine 4 Feb. 1990: 32-36, 48.
Trueheart, Charles. "Through a Mirror, Darkly." Washington
Post 26 Nov. 1991: B1-2.
Copyright 1995 Brian Finney