In Time’s Arrow, Dr. Friendly (or the conscious entity trapped inside him) experiences the flow of time in reverse. Broken teacups sweep themselves up of the floor and reassemble on the table. Meals are regurgitated and carefully sculpted into shape with knife and fork. Romantic relationships begin in acrimony and end (after a final flash of titillation) in mutual oblivion. The optics will be familiar to anyone who has read A Brief History of Time. But in Martin Amis’s novel they become the stage set for a strange moral allegory. And this is because Dr. Friendly is a man with the last sort of past to which one would wish to return. He is a Nazi war criminal. In the first century, Seneca noted that for man ultimate relief is always at hand. “See that precipice?” he wrote. “Down that is the way to liberty. See you that tree—stunted, blighted and barren? From its branches hangs liberty. Do you ask what is the highway to liberty? Any vein in your body!” But for Dr. Friendly, whose life begins with his expiration on an American hospital bed (and so whose life is a reversal of a life in which, ex post facto, he did not commit suicide) no such relief is possible. Eventually, inexorably, he will board a ship that will carry him back to Europe—a ship that will follow its path of foam with the same rigidity with which a train runs between iron rails. And from there he will proceed (via a temporary South American bolthole) up a hill backwards—to Auschwitz. Until the moment of his arrival at the death camp, the narrator’s world has been defiled by a sort of moral incoherence. As he watches his host carry out his duties as a doctor, for example, he notices that the doctor makes his patients sick and that for this service the patients are paid on their way in. But suddenly, there, in that hell of mud and blood and crematorium smoke, everything makes sense. Blows heal. Horrors comfort. And bodies (Arbeit mach frei) grow strong through labour. In this backwards world, the SS guards and Kapos and Nazi doctors are transfigured into alchemists of human life—men whose labours draw storms of human souls out of a red sky and bring them to life in the fire of the ovens. All is well—or rather, nothing is well, for there is no justice in a Holocaust doctor being made to re-live his crimes if, reversed, they appear to him as virtues. Until, that is, a final vision at the end (or beginning) of the novel. In that vision, Dr. Friendly, whose real name is Odilo Unverdorben, sees an open field of female archers and picks out one strange and disconcerting detail. It is an arrow flying through the air the wrong way: point-first.