Time's Arrow

Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence is a 1991 novel by the British writer Martin Amis. It recounts the life of a Nazi doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, in reverse, from the moment of his death to the moment of his birth. Time’s Arrow was nominated for the 1991 Booker Prize.

The novel begins on the operating table, somewhere in the United States, where Odilo dies. The narrator of the story is an entity that inhabits Odilo’s body, and witnesses everything that happens to Odilo, but cannot act in any way. Although the narrator is articulate and knowledgeable and has strong opinions about what he sees, he does not recognize that he is witnessing Odilo’s life in reverse. As a result, most of what he sees is baffling to him. For instance, when paramedics arrive at the scene of Odilo’s fatal car crash, the first thing they do is administer CPR. However, the narrator experiences this as the last thing the paramedics do, and he interprets the CPR as a farewell kiss.

The narrator gradually pieces together the circumstances of his life. He is a retired German-American doctor living in upstate New York. His name is Tod T. Friendly (we will learn shortly that this is a pseudonym). He lives a quiet, lonely life. When he starts a conversation at the grocery store, the dialogue takes place in reverse. “How are you today” becomes “aid u too y’rrah?”



Tod’s personal life is troubled. He has a drinking problem. He has terrifying dreams about babies and doctors. He has a series of sexual relationships, but he struggles to make an emotional connection. There is something in his past about which he is refusing to think.

Tod gets stronger and younger and moves to New York, where he calls himself John Young. Another German-American, Nicholas Kreditor, causes the name-change by telling John that the authorities are onto him.

John works in a hospital. To the narrator, his job seems to be hurting people. A patient arrives bandaged: John takes a nail from the trash, pushes it into the patient’s forehead and sends him away screaming. Outside work, he is a womanizer, compulsively pursuing sexual relationships in which he can wield—and abuse—emotional power over his partners.



John leaves for Europe—or rather, this is how the narrator interprets John’s reversed journey from Europe. The ship travels into its own wake, “as if we are successfully covering our tracks.” Arriving in Portugal, he changes his name to Hamilton de Souza. Then he travels secretively through Europe to Germany, where his name becomes Odilo Unverdorben.

Odilo works at Auschwitz, where finally his job makes sense to the narrator, because he seems to be creating people in the thousands. “Our preternatural purpose? To dream a race.” Odilo is an assistant to Uncle Pepi, who is in charge of this magical project (Amis enables the reader to identify “Uncle Pepi” as Josef Mengele, the doctor who conducted experiments on inmates at Auschwitz). The Jews created at Auschwitz are united into happy families and placed into prosperous lives. The narrator does not understand why Odilo’s wife, Herta, disapproves of this work. Odilo has a child, Eva, who dies soon after she is born.

The narrator is disappointed when Odilo is transferred to a facility which “creates” blind and disabled people instead of Jews. He misses the “great work” being achieved at Auschwitz.



Odilo becomes an officer in the Waffen SS. Under his direction, Jews are “released” from ghettos and placed in homes. At this stage of his life, Odilo is sexually impotent. The narrator suggests that there is a link between Odilo’s “omnipotence” over the Jews and his “impotence” with Herta. Earlier in their relationship, Odilo requires Herta to “do the housework naked, on all fours.”

Now Odilo attends medical school, where he meets Herta and is part of the Reserve Medical Corps. He moves in with his family and starts to shrink, becoming a child. For the first time in the narrative, Odilo is untroubled by guilt: he is “innocent, emotional, popular, and stupid.” Finally, he enters his mother’s body and waits for the moment when his father’s sperm will withdraw, which the narrator recognizes will be his end. In his final moments, the narrator has a vision of an arrow flying “the wrong way,” that is, feathers first.

Time’s Arrow explores the themes of reason and science, morality and guilt, and power both political and personal. Although the novel’s reception was largely positive, many critics were uneasy about Amis’s use of a striking stylistic trick to tell a story of such moral and historical gravity: “Amis's cleverness has a glare-y insistence to it… The Holocaust couldn't care less about his ingenuity” (Kirkus Reviews). However, Time’s Arrow is regarded as one of Amis’s major achievements and a significant contribution to postmodern British fiction.