“You do what you do best, not what’s best to do”

In the novel, “Times Arrow“, author Martin Amis uses an interesting creative trick to unwind, in reverse order, the life story of a man. He makes the narrator an entity, or consciousness, who comes into being only at the moment of the man’s death; living inside the man and feeling his feelings – but having no access to his thoughts and no ability to control what he says or does.

The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse direction. We observe the man’s life progressing from death to birth (like a movie being rewound) as he becomes younger and younger during the course of the novel.

The entity tries to comprehend the overall meaning of the episodes being witnessed but most of the man’s life events confuse the entity and are commonly misinterpreted because they are being observed in reverse. This entity as narrator is puzzled, baffled by his environment, feels that the world does not really make sense but has an intuitive grasp that he will eventually come to discover the sources that are at the root of what is being observed.

That leaves it up to the reader to construct from the backward descriptions what is really happening  – which is challenging and disorienting at times because it requires the reader to interpret what the narrator is saying and invert the sequence of descriptions to discover what is taking place.

What the reverse narrative slowly reveals is that the man is a doctor – first living as an old man in comfortable retirement somewhere in the Northeast United States and then he earns his living practicing medicine as a hospital doctor. He seems to be running from a sordid past and is always fearful of something, changing his identity and home address several times.

In 1948 he travels to Portugal and after that makes his way to Auschwitz where he serves as a doctor in the German concentration camps (where the narrator observes that he brings Jews back to life, reunites them with their families and sends them home).

His wife in Germany does not seem to approve of his work, but their relationship and his state of mind significantly improves when he leaves Auschwitz to attend medical school (where he suddenly stops having the nightmares that have haunted him for years). In the end he moves home with his family and becomes a child as the narrator becomes resigned to the knowledge that his life will soon end at the man’s birth.

One of the recurrent themes of the novel is the consistent misinterpretation of events by the narrator due to the reverse narrative. Some of the more interesting incorrect conclusions that are reached while observing life in reverse order include:

• The doctor being observed getting stronger and more virile as he gradually gets younger and recovers from his elderly infirmities. The narrator doesn’t understand why the doctor isn’t happy and more appreciative of how much better he is feeling every day.
• The doctor is disparaged by the narrator because he is seen taking large bills from the Church collection basket and putting them into his wallet.
• The doctor’s actions to help people are viewed as hurtful by the narrator because people come to him well and leave sick and in pain. He implants tumors, breaks limbs, heals cuts with a knife and always makes sure he sends patients away in worse shape than when they arrived. It is simply accepted that that the doctor gives money to patients for making them feel worse and that people wait for an hour in a physician’s waiting room after being examined.
• Pimps are viewed positively because they give their prostitutes money and heal them from their bruises with blows.
• The doctor’s relationships are portrayed with stormy beginnings that slowly fade into pleasant romances. Love letters come from the fireplace or trash, and he fights with women before going to bed with them.

The alarming irony is that the world only starts making sense to the narrator once the doctor reaches Auschwitz. In the crematories, the doctor’s work seems magical. Smoke is turned into thousands of corpses, and the corpses are given life. Gold is placed in the mouths of these bodies, and hair is put on their heads. Families are assembled with the perfect matchmaking skills of the Nazis and “channeled back into society.” The ghettos disappear and people are ferried back to their village homes.

The author makes a powerful argument that only in a completely upside-down, backward world do the actions of an evil Nazi regime during the Holocaust become comprehensible.

 

Some people say that the best way to live life is looking forward because there is nothing that we can do to change the past – but reading this book highlighted to me the value of looking back and contemplating what we should be doing today to avoid being haunted by regrets in the future.

At one point in the novel the narrator observes that people most often do what they do best, not what’s best to do. The doctor ended up tortured with nightmares and a lifetime of regrets for the actions he took early in his life – simply because he fell into the trap of taking the easy path of doing what he did best, rather than taking the more uncomfortable path of doing what he felt best.

The backwards journey the doctor travels from the state of a sinful, haunted war criminal to that of an immaculate being makes it clear that the doctor was not a monster when he was born and that he only became that way because he never pushed back to do what he felt would be best.

I think we are all guilty at times in our life of ignoring or going along with injustice and evil because it is difficult to fight and can lead to unpleasant negative consequences for us or our loved ones. In Bob Dylan’s song “Political World” he points to this problem with our culture when he sang “As soon as you’re awake you’re trained to take what looks like the easy way out“.

I think we would all do well to consider the lessons learned from this novel whenever we encounter difficult situations in our life – times when we are asked to do something that bothers our conscience or our sense of justice and fairness.

Hopefully, each of us will have the courage at those times to do what is best to do, even if it is difficult, so that we do not have to ever look back and relive our life with regrets.