SOURCE: "Problems When Time Moves Backwards: Martin Amis's Time's Arrow," in English: The Journal of the English Association, Vol. 42, No. 173, Summer, 1993, pp. 141-52.

In the following essay, Slater points to problems that occur in the narrative of Time's Arrow as Amis attempts to tell a story in reverse.

In his latest novel, Time's Arrow, Martin Amis takes up the challenge posed by Nabokov in Look at the Harlequins!: 'Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible'. Amis does perform this impossible task. His novel begins with the hero's death, and works back through his life more or less to his birth. The result is more eccentric than might be expected by readers familiar with flashbacks or works like Pinter's play Betrayal, whose scenes succeed each other in reverse chronology. For Amis moves backwards through time on a more...