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A miss for Amis's arrow starts a row An excerpt from The Sunday Telegraph (29 September 1991): 19. Why does it seem that it is always a novelist's worst novel that gets onto the Booker Prize shortlist? This year's case in point is Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. It is about a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz and the "gimmick" (a favourite Martin Amis word) is that time travels backwards in the novel. Thus the Nazis are seen to be life-givers, taking dead bodies into gas chambers, reviving them and returning them to their homes. Many people believe this device is over-clever, tasteless and trivialising. No wonder the bookies have made the novel the 2:1 favourite to win the £20,000 prize in a month's time. "I thought that the trick of telling [the story] backwards in that context was an inadmissible one," says Nicholas Mosley, whose own novel Hopeful Monsters won this year's Whitbread Prize. Mr Mosley, otherwise known as Lord Ravensdale, resigned from the Booker selection committee because Time's Arrow was shortlisted and not his first choice, Alan Massie's The Sins of the Father. Mr Massie's novel also deals with the Nazi death camps. Of Mr Amis's novel he says: "His failure to deal with the Holocaust is at the heart of his failure as a novelist. He has this style which we all agree is brilliant but it is always an end in itself, it is always attracting attention back to itself." Mr Amis Jr naturally disagrees. "If the critics think I didn't puzzle and struggle about it they're being disingenuous. Nazism was thoroughly ridiculous and can be ridiculed." Unfortunately I now find myself agreeing with Mr Amis's critics. To believe that the proper response to the Nazis and their horrors is ridicule is surely a trivial response.
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