There is something farcical – grotesque, even – about life played in reverse. A child falling into a tree. A sandwich emerging from a mouth, bite by reconstituted bite. A doctor unstitching a wound. The world is strange in any order, but rewind helps us notice – makes the ordinary absurd.
Novels that pick a fight with forward momentum tend to harness this absurdity, revel in it. In The Cockroach (2019), Ian McEwan gives us a sneering Brexit fable about political nostalgia. If voters want to turn back the clock, let them. He unleashes “Economic Reversalism”, which sees employees pay for the privilege of work, and every pound sent back to where it came from. In Time’s Arrow (1991), Martin Amis inverts the Holocaust. Just imagine it, he dares us: a network of sanatoriums instead of death camps. A vast machinery of reparation run by benevolent Nazis. How monstrously laughable.
