Sucked back from 'the blackest sleep' into old age and smalltown America, he first hears speech backwards. Amis permits his narrator, a soul-like observer imprisoned in Tod's body, one latitude. Narrative forces him back to what he has fled, but tricks the evil out of it. In later chapters, he is returning Jews from ash to flesh to emaciated life, and then reuniting them with their loved ones. In the early chapters, with time running backwards, the American medic is conscientiously helping 'demolish the human body' in some New England hospital: stitches are removed, knives and glass fragments reinserted, mangled bodies sent back to the streets. Destruction and creation take each other's place, which is appropriate enough: the novel's protagonist, good American doctor Tod Friendly, was once Nazi Dr Odilo Unverdorben. A letter in the fire 'unbuckles, turning from black to even white in the heat and delivering itself into our outstretched hand'.

We have all seen film rewound, and so can visualise the details in Time's Arrow. 'When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals'. As cities rebuild themselves, the planes retrieve their bombs by 'a miraculous magnetism'. This is the passage in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 where the hero, Billy Pilgrim, watches a backwards-run film of American bombing of Germany in the second world war. In an Afterword Amis acknowledges his debt to 'a certain paragraph – a famous one – by Kurt Vonnegut'. Action is like a film being run backwards. The protagonist gets younger, the universe contracts. Time's Arrow, however, truly reverses chronology. In all these cases, the separate episodes run forwards. Similarly, the six main sections of Don DeLillo's Underworld take us back in steps from 1992 to 1951, while Harold Pinter's play Betrayal is a study of adultery whose succeeding scenes take us back over the course of some nine years. The breaks between these sections jolt us back in time to see the causes of consequences we have already observed. Sarah Waters's The Night Watch, for instance, is composed of three sections labelled, in turn, '1947', '1944' and '1941'. Most narratives that run backwards do so in substantial sections of forward narrative. Time's Arrow is not the first novel with a reverse chronology, but no other novel has reversed time so conscientiously.

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis