Tod T. Friendly, and ends with his birth. Like Leonard in Memento , this Tod, who tells the story, has no idea what lies in his own past. Amis gets about as close as anyone can to telling a story backwards without actually running the words in reverse. Tod talks about a patient coming into the hospital with a bandage round his head. The doctors remove the bandage and stick a rusty nail into the wound.
Smoke is sucked down into factory chimneys.
It's Amis' way of tackling an almost unbearable subject. As we journey back in Tod's life, we discover he worked for Mengele performing medical experiments on victims in Auschwitz. Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker prize, but reviewers and readers are still sharply divided as to whether the novel is a brilliantly original work that brings home the horror to the reader in a way that conventional narratives cannot do, or whether it is a gimmicky exercise that merely trivialises the Holocaust. But even those who can't admire much else would surely have to admire Amis's extraordinary nerve. It's not just the literary end of the market that attempts to run its stories backwards.