Borrowed Time

The most recent book I finished reading was Borrowed Time, a NSA Doctor Who novel by Naomi A. Alderman, so I decided to do a review of it since it's been nearly fifteen days since I made a 'proper' blog post.

As you may remember from my Touched by an Angel review, the NSA books are a series of Doctor Who stories featuring current Doctors and companions. Naturally, then, Borrowed Time stars the 11th Doctor, Amy and Rory. The plot of the book follows Andrew Brown, a bank manager who never has enough time to do anything. He's constantly late for meetings, forgetting birthday's, etc, until one day he meets the enigmatic Mr. Symington and Mr. Blenkinsop. An unusual pair of businessmen, they offer Andrew a deal he can't turn down; a watch that allows him to turn back time, giving him chance to do all the things he wouldn't normally be able to. But, of course, it quickly becomes apparent that Symington and Blenkinsop are lying to Andrew, and it's up to the TARDIS trio to stop them.

The book's main setting is the Lexington bank, Andrew's workplace, and while a bank at first glance sounds like a rather mundane location for a Doctor Who story, it actually works really well. The villains of Borrowed Time are draining away the life from Andrew and the other workers who have been deceived into wearing the watches, but they are doing so through interest and small print; the parallels between the work of real-life banks and the alien schemes of the book are clear, which is why the bank is such a fitting setting. In fact, Borrowed Time is all about drawing parallels to banking and finance. The whole thing could be summed up by the phrase 'Time is Money' - the book is essentially the story of swindlers, robbing people of their cash through scams and misdirections, but instead of money they are stealing time from their victims, robbing years of people's lives to sell on the market. These connections make the book a lot more interesting to read than your average straight-up Doctor Who adventure, and some of the references are eerily familiar - in particular, the scene where Amy agrees to the terms and conditions of the watch, without reading them. Oh dear, oh dear.

The characters of the book are likable for the most part; Andrew and his bank co-workers are set up as real, believable people, which means we feel for them when their time is stolen away. Nadia and Sameera (in addition to Andrew himself) are in particular well-developed characters, and the author establishes their personalities very quickly and efficiently. The characters are also developed in such a way that they compliment the twists and turns in the plot - for example, one character is set up as a villain, only to actually be an innocent bystander. Alderman is good at making the reader expect one thing from a character, which means we are surprised when we get something completely different. Like I said, in this sense the characters add to the feeling of shock the reader feels when the plot twists unexpectedly. The heroes of the story (11, Amy and Rory) are also written well and convincingly for the most part, though Amy does seem unusually dim-witted in one scene - she really should, at this point, know better than to trust a man in a suit, selling time travel, in a 21st century banking office.

The book's story is pretty cerebral as NSA books go, leaning more towards the Doctor, Amy and Rory sneaking undercover into the bank to gather clues and solve the mystery, though it does become more action-packed and fast paced in the second half. There's a lot of time travel on display in the novel, which is pretty obvious given the time reversing watch; Alderman manages to fit an impressive amount of timey-wimeyness into the story, most of it revolving around the characters of Symington and Blenkinsop. There's time rewinding, paradoxes, slowing down and speeding up time, and quite a bit more. It all adds to the story, and each odd variant on time travel is interesting or amusing in it's own way. As for the villainous plan, the Doctor defeats the baddie in a refreshing way, using just his wits and his words, and his manipulation of the information he has available to him is delightful to read. The last few pages tie up the loose ends presented by the book, giving everyone a happy ending for the most part, and the story resolves itself neatly and tightly.

Overall, Borrowed Time is a good read and an enjoyable Doctor Who story. It lacks the emotional punch and the fantastic retrofitted plot of Touched by an Angel, but it draws some interesting connotations to the real world that make it more than just the average Who novel.

I'm very behind on my book reviews at the moment, as I've already finished reading the next book in my review pipeline - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - and I've started on another book, Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. I'm going to be doing a lot of reading over the next two weeks because I'm going on holiday, and it's going to be the sort of holiday which involves lots of sitting under a palm tree on a beach with a good book. A holiday for lazy people, in other words. So I'm going to have a bit of a backlog on book reviews for some time; never the less, I should have my next review up sometime soon after I get back from holiday. As for the Torchwood: Miracle Day review, I've decided I'm going to wait until the series finishes before I put it under the microscope, as the episodes are very much interconnected, and tell one big overarching story. That's all for now, so thanks for reading!