Amazon.co.uk Review
Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that's fundamentally unspeakable? Amis' solution is a deft literary conceit of narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the person of one man, ex-Nazi doctor Tod T. Friendly. One identity wakes at the moment of Friendly's death and runs backwards in time, like a movie played in reverse, (eg, factory smokestacks scrub the air clean,) unaware of the terrible past he approaches. The "normal" consciousness runs in time's regular direction, fleeing his ignominious history.

The "soul" of Doctor Tod Friendly is born as the doctor dies and proceeds to view his life, backwards, and with wide-eyed innocence and incomprehension.

As time travels backwards acts of violence become acts of healing and vice versa. Doctor Tod maims well patients in his Accident and Emergency Department, and later becomes the monstrous Auschwitz doctor who heals the tortured.

The concept of viewing a life backward provides some comic scenes, but we are all too aware before the end that something is horribly wrong in the Doctor's past.

Although this is an interesting way to view one of the major crimes of the twentieth century I feel this isn't as rich a piece of writing as one of the (many) sources Amis cites - Primo Levi.

An intriguing concept I couldn't resist, despite the perilous state of my To-Be-Read pile. I shall strap on my crampons to add this book to the teetering pile of books.

Interesting as an intellectual exercise but I'm not sure it adds greatly to our understanding of the historical events portrayed. Worth reading, if only for the fact that it seriously messed up my concept of time for a few days and I kept doing things backwards for a while.

Picked up copy and thought it looked interesting.