Time's Arrow [Martin Amis]

[Other Amis] [Prurient] [Reverse Time Travel]

Time's Arrow

Martin Amis

Harmony Books, NY. 1991. First American Edition. Slight soiling to dust jacket. Fascinating notes in the rear. An excellent copy.

From the publisher:

"Tod. T. Friendly is living his life in reverse. Doctor Friendly has just died, but he moves “out of blackest sleep” to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned. After weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colors existence in suburban America.

As Friendly breaks up with his lovers in a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home, his life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then back to the boat which reverses his course to the war-torn Europe Friendly came from, Amis brings the steeliest nerve to the job of realizing the novel’s inevitable logic. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly’s consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor’s most ambitious project yet—the final solution."

A very freaky, underrated and arcane work from Amis. He makes all these intense concepts come together - time travel, the final solution, the long arc of justice....weirdly underrated. The Prurient record inspired by it is great too. Who could have figured?