Like many older people, I have read a great deal about the Holocaust, from memoirs such as If This is a Man by Primo Levi through history books and of course fiction.
In recent months, I returned to the work of Martin Amis. I had fallen out with him after Yellow Dog, which I deeply disliked. Lionel Asbo was funny but attitudinally thoroughly unpleasant. The Pregnant Widow was more fun.
I had left The Zone of Interest on the shelf – Holocaust books had become too upsetting after graphic films such as Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice – but finally decided to see what Amis had to say. It is a masterful work, full of horror and insight. Shame that the film is said to be only loosely based on it, even though by all accounts it is an outstanding work itself. I am not sure whether I can watch it: the use of sound only to evoke the horrors nearby is a stroke of genius and I fear would haunt me.
I returned to a book that I had disliked on first reading and which, I had forgotten, was an early Amis Holocaust novel: Time’s Arrow. I understood it much better this time. One of my objections partly remains: the story is told backwards. Not just in reverse chronological order but events happening past-first: you have to find the start of dialogue a few lines or more ahead and read backwards. I think Martin Amis said at the time something like it was the only way he could come at the difficult subject. I didn’t and don’t find that very convincing.
The backward storytelling was a great opportunity for Amis to exercise his powerful imagination and literary skills. Many aspects are unexpected and even amusing. For example, the protagonist, a guilt-ridden ex-Nazi in hiding under a new identity, buys toys and gives them to children in the street. In Amis’s rendering, this becomes a child handing him a toy, which he takes to a shop where they give him money. Sex begins riotously and ends calmly. Love affairs are similar: shouting and tears at the beginning, tender scenes at the end. People grow younger rather than older, eventually taken back into the womb. A Navy helicopter ‘twirls upward from the ocean and crouches grimly on the deck of the aircraft-carrier, ready to fight.’[1] (49) [Don’t ask about eating…]
To enable the narrator to observe, and not understand, he is a vague concept: the protagonist and yet not; perhaps his soul or conscience; or his disassociated self.
The core of this is Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz and there is a sick sense of ‘if only’ in Amis’s conception: land is dug up and bodies come out of it, they are transported to the gas chambers where the gas brings them back to life, they dress, meet a new family and board a train with them to leave. Typically, he takes this all the way: the intent, it seems to the narrator, is ‘To dream a race. To make a people from the weather. From thunder and from lightning. With gas, with electricity… with fire’.[2] A horrific irony: that the Germans rescued the dead and created a vibrant Jewish community.
Does this work? Does it tell us anything? Most of the book takes place in the USA and is an extended experiment in consequences of seeing things back-to-front in time. Because of that, there would not be much story, or a very different story, if it were told chronologically: the narrator’s escape from Germany followed by his life in the USA. It’s not clear why we should care about the fantasy of Auschwitz back-to-front. It tells us nothing.
The likely crime of the main character (Tod Friendly – Tod means death in German) is relatively clear, its horror carefully foreshadowed by Tod’s nightmares) but the detail held in reserve. I think that, ultimately, Amis has come up with a strange, challenging idea – the Jewish community being created by the Germans – flowing from the reverse chronology, but the rest is padding. Inventive, intelligent, powerfully written, but really an extended literary exercise.
Towards the end, Amis sums up brilliantly. The various restrictions on Jews have been slowly and now completely lifted. The narrator is courting Herta (who we know he will later marry). The Nazi’s real name is used. Here we also see the narrator commenting on the protagonist even though ‘they’ are the same person
‘I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben,[3] as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptionable, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers. He could never be an exception; he is dependent on the health of his society, needing the sandy smiles of Rolf and Rudolph, of Rüdiger, of Reinhard. On Krystallnacht [sic] when we all romped and played and helped the Jews, and the fizzy shards swirled like stars or souls, and when Herta bent to wipe her lips with a pink handkerchief – before [kissing me][4]. Is it somehow the Jews’ fault? That lock of her hair he had kept in a pill box – why did he return it?[5] Now I can exactly see the shape and size, the perfect fit, of the loneliness[6] that is approaching. She gives me flowers, but she loves me not. She loves me not.’[7]
There is genius here. Note that tucked away description of the broken glass of Kristallnacht: ‘fizzy shards swirled like stars or souls’. So easy to read quickly and take in that the broken glass was like stars and miss the profound ‘souls’. The broken glass of that terrible day representing the souls of the Jewish people.
And slipped in, apparently irrelevant to the rest of the section: ‘Is it somehow the Jews’ fault?’
Does the book entirely work? No, not really. Is it worth reading? Of course. Everything Martin Amis wrote is spectacular in different ways. I write this review to help you decide.
Gally Maxwell
26 April 2024 (updated 27 April)
[1] Martin Amis (1991) Time’s Arrow. London, Penguin, p49.
[2] Page 128.
[3] The surname means ‘unspoilt’ or ‘pure’. There are differing claims for Odilo but one is ‘fortunate’ or even ‘fortunate in battle’. Liked his little jokes, Mr Amis.
[4] That is, after the kiss she wipes her mouth.
[5] This is in fact him receiving it and placing it in a pill box.
[6] The time before he was with Herta.
[7] Page 164-165.
Leave a Reply