PEARL
K.
BELL
285
sniff a foul odor on just about every page, to nail down the fetid atmo–
sphere of this Sydney suburb: this "second-rate landscape" that lacks "a
single building or street ... that might suggest beauty or happiness." But
instead of being moved by the moral and physical pathology he portrays
so fanatically, we recoil: there's a broad streak of sadistic brutality to
Carey's imagination that overwhelms his loftier intentions. In the finale
of
The Tax
Inspector,
when Benny lures Maria into his malodorous
basement lair and threatens to kill her as she is giving birth, we shudder
not only at the horror of the situation, but at Carey's all too obvious
relish for the rebarbative leaps of his imagination. He's a very clever and
skillful writer, but in the end he seems much too pleased with his own
macabre ingenuity.
Martin Amis's restless ingenuity trips him up in a more serious way in
Time's Arrow,
a laborious attempt to be "original" about the Holocaust
- hardly a subject that lends itself to the artful devisings of literary con–
trivance, or the sardonic bray of satire that has characterized his earlier
work. In his new novel Amis has literally bent over backwards to be dif–
ferent. Reversing the order of time, Amis's portrait of a Nazi doctor, as–
sistant to Mengele in Auschwitz, begins with his death and ends with his
birth, taking him from his final days in California through years of
medical practice in Boston and New York, to hiding out in Portugal
and Italy after the war, to Auschwitz, medical school, and birth in
Solingen, where Eichmann, too, was born. Conversations run from end
to start, seagulls fly in reverse, corpses come to life. Since the doctor is
incorrigibly priapic, the sexual implications of the backward scheme are
obvious.
Amis attempts to underscore the gravity of his undertaking by split–
ting the consciousness of his protagonist: The narrator is the soul of the
Nazi doctor - the confused, jauntily colloquial voice of conscience, un–
aware of the murderous, unrepentant body that maimed and destroyed its
victims in the camps. Through the separation of body and soul Amis tries
to drive home his point that the conscience of the doctor was totally
cut off from, and thus unable to comprehend or atone for, the atrocities
committed by his physical being. But does the backward narration in any
way intensify the evil of this doctor's life? On the contrary, what the
reverse action makes dismayingly clear is the bag-of-tricks gamesmanship
that inspired this grievously misguided approach to the Holocaust. We
can only wince, and worse, at the gallows facetiousness that brings dead
bodies to life with poisonous injections and fire. "I saw the old Jew float
to the surface of the deep latrine, how he splashed and struggled into
life, and was hoisted out by the jubilant guards, his clothes cleansed by
the mire." Such manipulative "irony" denies the essential horror of
Auschwitz, which is that the Jews struggled not into life but into death.
