BBC Books Borrowed Time

Author	Naomi Alderman
ISBN	1 849 90233 5
Published	2011

Synopsis: Andrew Brown never has enough time. No time to call his sister, or to prepare for that important presentation at the bank where he works. The train's late, the lift jams. If only he'd had just a little more time. And time is the business of Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop. They'll lend him some -- at a very reasonable rate of interest.

• In the Interest of Time by Matthew Kresal

In the Interest of Time by Matthew Kresal 11/12/24

"I wish I had more time."

Who among us hasn't said that at one time or another. For writers, it's something that seems to sum up so much of our time (especially during NaNoWriMo, which is taking place as I type these words). Imagine that someone could offer it to you and, with it, a chance to do all the things you wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to accomplish. All for a low interest fee. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Not to mention a plot idea more than worthy of Doctor Who. No wonder then that Naomi Alderman, future bestselling author of The Power, used it as the premise for her 2011 novel featuring the Eleventh Doctor.

Set in the gap between A Christmas Carol and The Impossible Astronaut, Borrowed Time fits neatly into the early Moffat era. Alderman put her spin on "timey wimey" by taking the Doctor, Amy and Rory someplace where time is literally money: a London-based investment firm. One that seems the very model for the modern British economy, so much so that it's attracted government attention. And, of course, with a secret at its heart that explains how its productivity has risen some 300 percent in a short time.

Published in 2011 and set in 2007, it's hard not to read the novel with another dozen years worth of hindsight as Alderman doing a Doctor Who take on the Great Recession. Something that would have been too topical perhaps for the series to tackle on-screen (at least directly or until the Chibnall era took aim at hot button topics) but something that suited the Doctor's literary adventures. There's biting satire of toxic mortgages, the overinflated worth of assets and, of course, what happens when the markets go into utter panic. Largely set inside a single firm that has become the beating heart for a financial power that few know exists, let alone understand. A system corrupt to its core, capturing the best and brightest young professionals and eventually sapping them for all their worth.

Literally, in this case, through the auspices of the time lending schemes of Symington and Blenkinsop.

Being Doctor Who, what would the novel be without some villains? Symington and Blenkinsop fill that gap for much of the novel's length, first as odd merchants of time and then as something far more threatening. Alderman's prose is excellent, making it easy to imagine the pair, and sometimes multiple versions of them existing at the same time, pursuing the novel's characters through lobbies and corridors. That they're not alone seems a forgone conclusion but, also in keeping with the era that spawned the novel, Alderman is coy about who the power behind them is until it suits the narrative for a late but satisfying twist in the tale.

It also helps that Alderman knows this TARDIS crew and gets the Doctor Who universe so well. Capturing the quicksilver aspects of Matt Smith's Doctor in prose can be as challenging as capturing Patrick Troughton. Yet Alderman does so with seemingly consummate ease, capturing the utterly childlike joy and humor of the character in scenes such as his arrival at the firm where the Doctor is impersonating an efficiency expert. But the novel also captures the darker, more world- (nay, universe-) weary aspects of that incarnation well, from realizing the danger one of his companions has gotten into to the novel's climax. If there's a piece of prose that's captured Smith's Doctor, it would be Borrowed Time.

What about Amy and Rory? Set in the still early days of their TARDIS travels and their marriage, the chemistry that Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill shared on-screen is replicated here. As are aspects of their story arcs, from Amy trying to find the balance in her life between time with the Doctor and her love for Rory to the sense of Rory having an inferiority complex thanks to the Doctor's presence in Amy's life. Alderman, too, weaves these into the plot, making them important emotional beats, replicating Moffat era tropes there as well. Like with other aspects of the novel, Alderman is able to return somewhat to the old "stories too broad and deep for the small screen" approach of Doctor Who books of yesteryear by exploring character aspects and concepts that Modern Who's 45-minute format might well have struggled with.

That said, Alderman's novel suffers from some of the pitfalls of the TV era that originated it. Though well-paced and bordering on being a page turner, there are times when it becomes difficult keeping track of which versions of Symington and Blenkinsop are appearing in some sequences. The ideas regarding time and compound interest are, as mentioned above, intriguing ones, but there are times when the novel gets mired in all but lecturing the reader about what it's all about. Even if it does offer a neat full-circle item about the tulip mania that gripped 1630s Holland (why hasn't Doctor Who tackled that as a story, one wonders?). Like the Moffat era, the ideas are intriguing, but the execution can sometimes be lacking, even if Alderman does a solid job for much of the novel's length.

While being something that could have been an episode on TV can be off-putting for some (and a nightmare for others), it's something that suits Borrowed Time rather well. Indeed, the novel is a better take on the "Doctor Who in a bank" idea than TV's Time Heist a few years later. More than that, it also brings out what literary Doctor Who has done so well since the early 1990s: go further that the TV series could go.

Though, finishing the novel, I was left with one unanswered question: did the Doctor cause the Great Recession?