Aftermath and beforemath

• Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
  
• Motoring as Metaphor by Rachel Cusk
  
• The Pianist of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek, as performed at the Segal Centre, September 2019

The metaphorical "time's arrow" flies backwards in the novel by Amis. We begin at the end, and end at the beginning. It's clever and expertly executed: food comes out of mouths to be arranged neatly on plates, babies return to their wombs, and the principal character youths (unages?) back through his life. We start with his death, and fast reverse through his old age, then the silver-haired honorable phase of his medical career, back to his mid-life crisis, than to young adulthood where we arrive in a dreadful place. For it soon becomes clear that we will pass through the Holocaust, when the venerable doctor, now a young Nazi medic in Auschwitz, will reconstitite families from piles of twisted corpses.

Why does Amis go to the trouble of telling the story in reverse? Well one reason might be to showcase his brilliance, I suppose, but the reverse exposition had a profound effect on me: I turned each page with an intensifying and terrible dread. The crimes were committed in the medic's youth in the few years of the war. His long life afterwards was an aftermath, a war criminal whose assumed identities never erase who he is. By telling his story in reverse we spend almost all of the novel swimming back through the chill aftermath, our despair growing as we know where we will inevitably end: at the very beginning of the horror. It's not a page turner but it's quite unforgettable.

In Rachel Cusk's essay "Motoring as Metaphor" she recounts an incident involving an elderly driver where, though time's arrow flies in its usual direction, the end changes everything that came before. Cusk writes:

A few years ago a woman of 94 killed a girl of 10 at a pedestrian crossing. There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman's life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work. Since she had already lived an unusually long life I wondered whether the woman wished she had died before killing the girl

Knowing how her story ends causes us to see her 94 years as the lead-up to a tragedy. Effectively that's how Amis is telling his story too, a horror story whose end/beginning changes everything.

Amis tells us the story of a perpertrator, whereas it's the long aftermath of the victims that is the story told by Mona Golabek. A classical pianist, as was her mother who escaped Vienna for London on a kindertransport in 1938, destined to never see her parents again. She grew up in London; they were murdered in Auschwitz. The thread that binds her story is music as she plays the pieces her grandmother taught her mother, Grieg's piano concerto foremost amongst them, echoing down the years of the aftermath. Each piece is as beautiful as when it was first played but each is also changed forever for having passed through those times in the minds of the victims: the dead and their descendants. As we listen to the story and the music, told and played beautifully by Golabek, we are still very much in the aftermath of the horrors, 71 years later.