Review: Borrowed Time by Stephen Anthony Brotherton
I received a free copy of this book from the author in return for an honest review.
‘Rico, Mary, and a gangster named Fats find themselves on the run beyond the veil of death, caught in a deadly game of power and revenge.
‘Their fates lie in the hands of Octavius and his embittered daughter, Livia, who can never forgive her father for gambling away her mother to the devil, Wrath.
‘As the game unfolds, long-buried questions surface – about destiny, fulfilment, and the true nature of the soul.
‘With demons both personal and literal to face, only the Fates know who will survive.’
In Borrowed Time, by Stephen Anthony Brotherton, there are three connected sets of characters. Outside of human space and time, where the gods dwell, Emperor Octavius challenges his young adult daughter, Princess Livia, to keep her human champion, Rico, safe from his fearsome “Jinga” warriors while collecting three crystals from different otherworldly locations. There’s no love lost between father and daughter, since Octavius lost Livia’s mother, Helena, to the devil, Wrath, in a game of cards when she was a child.
Accordingly, we follow Rico and his partner/soulmate Mary as they use a magic ring to traverse worlds and find the crystals while evading capture. We also follow Fats: a young gangster who’s just met an unfortunate end for angering the big boss. Livia steps in and promises him another shot at life – if he can act as a decoy, diverting the Jinga’s attention from Rico and Mary while avoiding getting himself killed for good this time.
Will Livia win the game? Can the three humans survive? And is there still a chance of recovering Helena from the underworld?
While Brotherton’s short story collections, Watching the Wheels and Mum and Boy, have supernatural elements, they’re firmly anchored in everyday settings, so it was an intriguing surprise to find Borrowed Time to be the other way round. Much of the action takes place in otherworldly locations, with scheming gods (not just Octavius and Livia) calling the tune, and Fats’ narrative being the most terrestrial.
The gods in this novel are clearly inspired by those of ancient Greece, with their interpersonal dramas and individual-level intervention in humans’ lives – whether that’s messing with them to relieve boredom, or falling in love and having children with them (Helena is a human, so Livia is technically half-god). At the same time, Brotherton’s gods (and the humans and animals of various forms who live alongside them) are all his own, giving the story a real sense of fun and ‘how on earth did he come up with that?’ imagination.
They’re thoroughly modern too, with Octavius tempting Mary with a memory stick containing details of the immoral life Rico lived before being chosen as Livia’s champion, and Livia keeping in shape on the treadmill. A detail that especially delighted me was Livia’s “uniform” of pinstripe suit and red pixie boots, harking back to the “guardian angel” figure who shows up in quite a few of Brotherton’s short stories.
On the human side, I was particularly compelled by Fats’ storyline: as someone who’d lived and died by the sword, and had been given a decoy role, his narrative was characterised by suspense and danger, and accessorised with some brilliantly gruesome war stories. His tone is often humorous and/or ironic, and the details of the unnamed British town he terrorised in life feel very authentic.
Rico and Mary are likeable animal lovers, and I was cheering them on, but Mary is definitely the sturdier and more persistent of the pair – I’m not quite sure how Rico managed to become a champion before meeting her! Some aspects of their trials put me in mind of Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang, another book where I was impressed by the author’s feats of imagination.
This is the first book in a trilogy, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what weird and wonderful beings, places, and events I’ll encounter in books two and three. Without giving too much away, the humans’ stories are all wrapped up by the end of this instalment, so this could be the end of their parts in the story – but if they do return, I’ll be happy to spend more time in their company.
Borrowed Time is an imaginative, surprising, and suspenseful gods-messing-with-humans fantasy novel.