The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Martin Amis · a novel, with the author’s afterword · Jonathan Cape, London, 1991 · scored on Amis’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Holocaust novel as formal experiment; the comedy of a reversed world turning into the perpetrator’s vision
Mythos
Creation reversed: a Genesis run backward out of fire and smoke at Auschwitz; a soul bound to a body whose deeds it witnesses and cannot alter, travelling back toward the offence as toward a Fall
Phase
One life from deathbed to birth: old age in New England, a medical career in New York, a flight through Europe, the camp, and infancy
Presentation
Fiction; first person, told by a consciousness inside the man, events and dialogue running backward while the narrator’s thought runs forward; an afterword naming the sources
Register
From the innocent, bewildered voice of the narrator and the comedy of a backward world to the exact and uncomic telling of the camp
Scale
One man’s life under four names, across two continents, in a short novel
Governing Proposition
A consciousness wakes in the body of an old man dying in America and lives his life backward with him, from death to birth: the dying recover, the old grow young, food rises whole from the mouth, and the narrator, who cannot read the man’s thoughts, travels toward something the man has spent his life not knowing. Tod T. Friendly becomes John Young, a doctor in New York, then a fugitive in Europe, and at last Odilo Unverdorben, a doctor at Auschwitz, where the backward world turns murder into creation. The wager of the novel is that a story told in reverse can show the Nazi doctors’ moral order as they lived it, killing understood as healing, and the offender’s conscience as a second self that goes on living under a friendly name.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel begins at a deathbed that its narrator takes for a birth. A consciousness wakes inside an old man in an American hospital, and from there the man’s life runs backward: he recovers, leaves the hospital and begins to grow younger. The narrator lives in the man’s body and sees with his eyes, but cannot read his thoughts, and does not know his past, which is to say his future. The man’s name is Tod T. Friendly, and he lives in a town in New England. The narrator knows him from the inside and does not know him at all.
The world runs in reverse, and the narrator must learn its law as he goes. Food rises whole from the mouth. In the shops money flows to the shopper. Wounds close. Conversations come in backward order, the answer before the question, so that talk is nonsense until the reader turns it round. The narrator’s own thought runs forward: he reasons and guesses and is easily moved, and he draws the wrong conclusions with confidence. The comedy is real. A backward world is funny, and Amis lets it be.
Under the comedy something else grows. Tod is afraid. He fears doctors; he flinches from certain words and sounds; and as he grows younger he grows more afraid, as though something ahead of him in the telling, which is to say behind him in his life, were waiting. The narrator does not understand the fear, and at moments shares it. The reader begins to guess what he cannot. The book’s first discipline is this gap between what the narrator sees and what the reader comes to know, and its pressure grows as the man grows young.
Movement II
The man was a doctor. Going back, the narrator follows him to New York, where he practised under another name, John Young, and the backward law reaches medicine. Seen in reverse, a doctor’s work is the infliction of harm: the patients leave his care wounded, and the hospital sends them out into the world to sicken. The narrator is shocked. It is the book’s first moral inversion, and it is played as horror inside the comedy.
The inversion is a preparation. The reader is being taught a grammar, and its rule is now plain: whatever a doctor does, the backward world shows as its opposite, and a healer appears as a wounder. The question the grammar raises is what it will make of a doctor whose work was not healing. The narrator does not ask it. He is busy with the man’s life, his habits and his fear. But the hospital has set the terms on which everything after it will be read.
The names are stages. John Young grows younger as the narrator follows him, and the friendly name of the old man will read differently once the reader knows where the life began. The names the man has worn are the layers of a concealment, and the narrator travels back through them one by one, as a conscience might travel back through the aliases of a man who has made himself someone else. Each name is earlier than the last, and closer to the one he was born with.
Movement III
Before New York there was a crossing. The narrator follows the man back through a flight across Europe after the war, under a further name, by way of Rome and the Church, the road by which war criminals escaped. Run backward, the flight shows the fugitive leaving his refuges one by one and returning toward the place he fled. It is the passage between two worlds: the American life, and the one that life was built to hide.
As the man grows younger he grows more afraid, and then, as they near the camp, the narrator’s feeling changes. He becomes convinced that the world is about to start making sense. Everything he has found absurd or cruel in the backward life, the wounding doctors, the flight, the hiding, is about to be put right. The reader, who knows where the book is going, hears in that hope what the narrator cannot hear.
The name the man was born with arrives with the war. He is Odilo Unverdorben, a doctor at Auschwitz, serving under the man he calls “Uncle Pepi”, who is Josef Mengele. The narrator has reached the place toward which the whole narration has been travelling, and he does not know what it is. The structure now stands open as an argument: a conscience approaching the thing it refused to know, which it can recognise only when it arrives, and which, arriving backward, it will not recognise at all.
Movement IV
At Auschwitz the backward world makes sense at last, as the narrator hoped, and the sense is monstrous. Run in reverse, the camp is a place of creation. The ash is drawn up out of the sky and down the chimneys; the dead are made whole in the fire; the gold returns to their teeth; families are reunited, loaded onto trains and carried away to their homes. The narrator rejoices. He has found what the doctor’s life was for: here the doctors heal, and a people is made out of fire and smoke.
The reader cannot rejoice, because every reader knows which way the trains really ran. What the narrator sees is the camp as its perpetrators told it to themselves: a work of healing, the making of a people through destruction. The regime’s own myth of creation becomes, for one chapter, the novel’s plot. The beauty of the surface is the horror, and the book never lets the reader share the narrator’s joy without knowing it for what it is.
Here the comedy stops. The prose that made jokes of the backward shop and the backward conversation keeps its exactness and drops everything else. The narrator’s innocence, which had been funny, becomes unbearable, because it is the innocence the man made for himself: the part of him that knew nothing, and went on living in America under a friendly name. The two who share the body, the one who acted and the one who does not know, are the doctor and the self he kept apart from what the doctor did.
Movement V
After the camp the life runs on backward to its source. The man grows young, then a child; the war recedes behind him into what, for the narrator, is the future. After the chapter that preceded it, the descent toward infancy has a cold quiet. The narrator, who found his sense at the camp, travels on into a life before the offence, toward a birth.
The book ends at the birth, where every backward life must end, and the offence is left behind in the past toward which the narration has been travelling all along. The subtitle names what the book has shown: the nature of the offence, its shape, the way it was done and the way it was hidden from the man who did it. How Odilo became capable of it, the book does not examine. It shows the offence from inside, and leaves its making closed.
An afterword names the sources. Amis gives Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, published in 1986, as the book’s chief source, and names Primo Levi. The device itself had been used before: by Philip K. Dick in a novel of 1967, and by Kurt Vonnegut in a paragraph of Slaughterhouse-Five, where a bombing raid runs in reverse and the bombs return to the planes. Amis took it to the length of a novel and turned it on the perpetrator. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.
Act III · The Twelve
The frame resists the subtractive test: every stage of the reversed life is required by what the reversal has to show. The American years come first because the reader must learn the backward law in ordinary life before it reaches Auschwitz. The New York hospital comes before the camp because there the law yields its first moral inversion: the doctor, seen backward, wounds the patients he treats, so that when the camp comes, where the doctor’s work was killing, the backward view will make it healing. The flight through Europe is the passage between them. Where the test bites is the comedy of the American part: the backward jokes recur after the reader has learned the law, and the affairs of Tod’s middle age run past the point where they add a turn. Perhaps a sixth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure holds: the Nazi doctors’ work made sense only to minds that had reversed the moral order, so that killing was understood as healing, and a narrative that reverses time can show it as they saw it. Read backward, Auschwitz becomes a place of creation, where the dead rise from the ovens, the gold returns to their teeth, and families are reunited and sent home; the reader sees with horror that this is the perpetrator’s story about himself. The second disclosure is the form of the offender’s conscience: the narrator, innocent, bewildered and bound to a body he cannot govern, is the perpetrator’s divided self, the part that knows nothing and lives on in America under a friendly name. Held below the gate because much of the insight is Robert Jay Lifton’s, acknowledged in the afterword, and because Odilo himself stays closed: the book shows the shape of the offence and leaves its making unexamined.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is rare, and it is high. The Auschwitz chapter is the book’s summit and its reason: the camp seen running backward, the ash drawn up out of the sky and the chimneys, bodies made whole, people loaded onto trains and carried away to their homes, so that the dreadful sublime arrives inside a vision of mercy. That double register, terror under the appearance of creation, is a height few novels of its size reach. Before it there are smaller rises, above all the dread that grows as the man grows younger and more afraid of something ahead; after it, the descent to infancy has a cold quiet. Held here because the American half is comedy by design, the backward jokes keeping the register low across most of the book, and the height comes once, if at length.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth is built in one place and evoked elsewhere. The built part is creation reversed: at Auschwitz the backward world makes the Nazi project into a Genesis, a people made out of fire and smoke and returned to life, so that the regime’s own myth of creating a race through destruction becomes, for a chapter, the novel’s plot. The soul bound to a body, a spirit that witnesses the deeds of a man and cannot alter them, is an old pattern, and it governs the narration from the first page: the soul goes back with the body toward its origin, where the offence waits as the Fall waits at the start of the story. Held well below the gate because the man is not a figure who bears archetypal weight, the American chapters are realist comedy with no myth in them, and the soul and the body are a device more than a structure the book explores.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The device is inherited. Carroll’s White Queen remembered both ways, Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button grew young, Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World ran the world in reverse, and Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse-Five, had run a bombing raid backward in a paragraph, the bombs returning to the planes. The turn is in what the device is used for, and at what length: a whole novel told in reverse to show the Holocaust from inside a perpetrator, by a British writer known for comic satire of London and its money. The stake was real. The book risked the charge, which some reviewers made, that a formal trick had been laid on the worst event of the century. Held below the gate because the wager was placed on a proven device, which Vonnegut had already joined to a war’s atrocity, and the perpetrator’s view of the camps had been opened by the testimony and history the afterword names.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Told forward, the life of Odilo Unverdorben is a familiar story of a war criminal who escaped and lived quietly in America. Told backward, it becomes the argument. The narrator travels toward the offence and cannot know it until he arrives, so the structure is the approach of a conscience to the thing it has refused to know. The reversal makes medicine wounding in New York and murder creation in the camp, so the form is the moral inversion it discloses. The narrator’s separation from the body that acts is the perpetrator’s doubling made into a point of view. The reversed dialogue, line by line, is incomprehensible until it is read again forward. Held off the top because the device is also a source of comedy that the knowledge does not need, and through much of the American part the form entertains more than it knows.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence first, and thirty-five years supply some. The book asks to be read twice, the second time knowing where it ends, and on return the American scenes change: the friendly old man’s fear of doctors, his flinching from certain words and sounds, his name itself, all read differently once the camp is known. The reversed dialogue repays decoding. Scholarship is real and moderate: the book has a place in the study of Holocaust fiction and in the criticism of Amis, and the argument over whether a formal device can bear the subject has been continuous. Held low because the semantic yield is bounded: once the reversal is understood, its meaning is largely known, and what the book discloses on the fifth reading is close to what it disclosed on the second. The return is to its ingenuity more than to an inexhaustible meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the British novel of its years and, beyond it, the fiction of the Holocaust. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that a perpetrator’s consciousness could be entered by form rather than by confession, that a formal device could carry moral knowledge about atrocity, and that a comic novelist could write the subject without either solemnity or obscenity. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a place on the Booker shortlist of 1991; a continuing place in the debate over the representation of the Holocaust, where it is still cited; and a standing as one of the most read of Amis’s novels. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is that reach: no practice or school can be shown to have turned on the book. Later fiction narrated by perpetrators did not take its form, and the backward narrative did not become an instrument others used to the same end.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over thirty-five years, and it is weighed as thirty-five years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout. Its surface is barely fixed to its moment: the American scenes belong to the decades they depict, and the subject has not dated. The book is continuously read and taught, and Amis’s death in 2023, with the attention given to his later novel of Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest (2014), and to its film, has kept it in view. Presence is where it is charged: it is read as one of Amis’s novels and as a text in a field of study, more than across the culture, and its presence is narrower than that of the most widely read novels of its decade. Decades demonstrate less than centuries, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on Amis’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. To write a whole novel in reverse, keeping the physical world consistent in every gesture while the narrator’s thought runs forward, is a feat of control few writers could have sustained, and Amis sustains it. The reversed dialogue is built so that each exchange makes sense backward as one exchange and forward as another, and the reader can do both. The narrator’s voice, innocent, curious and easily moved, is held throughout and is unlike Amis’s usual voices. At the camp the prose drops its comedy and keeps its exactness. Charged: the backward jokes repeat their mechanism and go on after they have done their work; at moments the Amis manner, the knowing phrase and the comic aside, enters where the narrator’s innocence should keep it out; and some of the women of Tod’s later life are drawn as types.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs: time reversed in the world, forward in the narrator’s mind, and the moral order inverted by the reversal. Take the two most distant elements, the backward comedy of a New England retirement, a man growing younger among his neighbours, and the backward camp, the dead raised from the fire. They obey the same law with one rigour, across a wide range. The law holds in small things: wounds closing under the surgeon’s hand, money flowing to the shopper, letters received before they are sent. Charged: the division between backward events and forward thought is a rule the book needs and does not always keep clean, since the narrator learns and remembers as he goes and seems at moments to know what the body has done; and his inability to read the man’s thoughts is relaxed when the plot needs it, in dreams and in the flashes of fear he shares.
Score: 8.5 / 10
For a short novel it holds many orders, and one life holds them. Consciousness, divided between the narrator and the man. The body, in medicine, illness and age, with the doctor’s trade at the centre of each part of the life. History, from the camps through the flight of war criminals by way of Rome and the Church to postwar America. The state, in the Nazi apparatus and its medicine. Sexuality and marriage, in Tod’s women and Odilo’s wife. The sacred, in the reversed Genesis and in the narrator’s sense of himself as a soul. They are integrated, not listed: each is the field of one man’s offence and evasion. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with one other, is what the form cannot hold: the victims are seen only as the backward world shows them, in crowds and not as persons; labour, class and the family across time are thin; and the short span of the telling holds a life in outline.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 8.7, then The Inner Law at 8.5. A form that is the argument, a conscience travelling backward toward the offence it refused to know, with medicine made wounding and murder made creation by the reversal itself; a sustained feat of control, the physical world kept consistent in every backward gesture while the narrator’s thought runs forward, and reversed dialogue that makes sense both ways; and one law, time reversed in the world and the moral order with it, governing everything from a New England retirement to the camp.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 7.6. The first is held because, though the book showed that a formal device could carry moral knowledge of atrocity, no practice or line of later books took its method, and its reach is citation in a debate; the second because the victims are seen only as the backward world shows them, in crowds and not as persons, labour, class and the family across time are thin, and the short span holds a life in outline. Next above them, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.8: the myth is built in one chapter and absent from the American comedy, and once the reversal is understood its meaning is largely known.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.4 fall a tenth short of the bar of 8.5, The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 seven, and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 nine. The Universal Minimum is met, by a tenth (Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 is the lowest axis it counts, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.2, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence, published by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1991, and in the United States the same year; it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991, the year Ben Okri’s The Famished Road won. It is scored as one novel with its short afterword, which names the book’s sources and is part of the published work. Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986), the book’s chief source, and Primo Levi, both named there, are not part of the work. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Amis’s English, with no translation between. Events and dialogue are paraphrased, and only names are quoted. The pagination, the number of chapters and the word count are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the name of the New England town, the name the man takes in his flight and the country he takes it in, which earlier writers the afterword acknowledges besides its sources, and the record of the book in particular studies and courses, are not given. Citations are by stage of the man’s life.