Borrowed Time

Borrowed Time

Borrowed Time. By John Nolte, Bombardier Books, 2023.

Borrowed Time is a novel fueled by big ideas and the little moments that make up life.  It’s both an epic tale and a collection of miniatures, a story of an ordinary man with a supernatural ability that’s probably more curse than blessing.  Throw in a romance that’s both ordinary and extraordinary, a cast of memorable characters including some of the best-written villains in recent memory, and a serial killer with a grudge against all that is holy, and the result is one of the most resonant and powerful novels in years.

 

The central character is Joshua Mason, a man who’s average in every way save for his immortality.  Born millennia ago, he has made it into the present day as a perennial forty-something, never aging.  He can be wounded or killed, but immediately afterwards he comes back to life by an isolated tree in the desert, healed and whole. Mason has no desire to leverage his unique ability into fame or fortune or power.  All he wants is to exist, quietly savoring moments and trying to stay off the radar of those who might learn of his longevity and exploit it, though as the twenty-first century dawns, that grows increasingly challenging.

 

But after thousands of years of living forever with nothing to live for, Mason met Doreen, the proprietor of a motel in the American Southwest that’s barely staying afloat.  They married and enjoyed a simple but happy life, raising Doreen’s grandson Charlie, who was left severely mentally impaired after a car crash that killed his parents.  As they’re often in need of money, Mason has been forced to turn to drastic measures, selling himself to the rich and powerful who see homicide as a sport, knowing that for him, death is only a temporary inconvenience.  After a few decades pass, Doreen reaches the end of her natural life span, rejecting Mason’s offer of sharing his immortality as an unclean thing, leaving Mason adrift and responsible for Charlie’s care, with murderous forces converging all around them.

 

Gradually, more and more snapshots of American life are revealed, from the venal manipulators who use their influence to control and destroy others, to broader cultural cancers with the potential to crush millions of people.  Societal ills, human frailties, and larger movements with seemingly benign intentions and destructive results abound.  It’s a very dark story, but amazingly, it’s also a warm story, because even as Nolte targets everything that’s wrong with the world, he never loses an opportunity to illustrate how important it is to savor life’s moments of joy.  There’s plenty of danger and no despair.  At times, the forces of darkness in Nolte’s world seem unstoppable, but there are little lights of hope, humanity, and divine grace that make it clear which side will win in the end, even if so much of what people are obsessed with today is nothing but rapidly-fading vanity.

 

Nolte’s personal worldview is tightly intertwined with the story of Borrowed Time, but it never comes across as blatant message-pushing.  Whether it’s wonderment and horror at the leviathan nicknamed “the All at Once,” or bewilderment at the damage people inflict on themselves as a distraction, morality (not moralizing) is front and center in the story.  Taking tropes from other novels and putting his own personal spin on them, Nolte creates a man who “tends to his own garden” in a novel that’s more humane than Voltaire’s Candide, a dystopian government that’s as terrifying as Orwell but closer to our present reality, and a vision of the world’s end that’s told with Vonnegut’s wit but with more faith.

 

It’s the characters that make the novel shine.  There are fiends in human form but no saints, although there are several very good people who are striving to live virtuous lives in their own ways.  Interestingly, many individuals aren’t who they appear to be at first.  A seeming innocent is filled with inhuman darkness.  A ostensible slacker jerk turns out to be in the middle of a personal redemption arc.  An otherwise decent person is revealed to have done something that hurt someone else terribly, only for this transgression to rebound tragically decades later.  Borrowed Time also has plenty of brilliant villains, including a bureaucrat with ambitions for dictatorship, a vile plutocrat who’s disinclined to seek divine forgiveness and is cocky enough to believe that he can charm Satan, and a hit man filled with sleaze and self-loathing. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming in characterization is the case of a multiple murderer, where an insufficient attempt is made to explain why that person is so broken.  It’s a case where evil is left inexplicable.  In contrast, many other characters, some of whom are only around for a few pages, are given heartbreaking character arcs, explaining why they made terrible decisions that sent their lives into downward spirals.  For almost every other character, devastation and tragedy are the result of a deliberate choice to pursue selfish sins instead of decency and virtue, and while the main villain’s motives are explored, the ultimate cause of the never-healing wound needs more attention.  It’s one misstep in a remarkably well-crafted collection of characters.

 

Nolte has claimed that this is his first and only novel.  With such a powerful debut, one hopes that he changes his mind and keeps writing.