The Thief of Time | John Boyne

Can love change the trajectory of a life that you thought was unchangeable? That's a big question raised by John Boyne in The Thief of Time, a novel this Irish writer published in 2000. This is one of those books I just pulled off the library shelf. I love time travel stories (Time and Again, by Jack Finney remains on my Top 5 Favorites of All Time), and I thought this might be something like that. This is a good read.

The story centers around time but the story is very different. Matthieu Zela (there's an accent mark over the e but I don't know how to make it), is 256 years old when we meet him. Ends up he's that (very) rare person who doesn't age past a certain time. In his case, he ages up to early-mid 50s and just stops, with his silvery hair, still fit body and oodles of charm and intelligence. He has a great sense of humor about his age but because his body doesn't betray him as it can in real life, he doesn't get "old" in the way we may think about it. Because it's fiction, no one figures out his situation.

Matthieu was born in France in 1743 and moved around Europe and the United States, amassing incredible adventures, countless relationships and considerable wealth. The story begins when he and his half-brother Tomas leave France after their parents both die, and meet up with Dominique who Matthieu falls in love with. The story bounces around in time between the mid 18th century to 1999. The thread that connects this is that Matthieu always has a nephew named Tom/Tommy/Tomas/Thomas who he is connected with, and that nephew always dies tragically young (just after creating a new Tom/Tommy/Tomas/Thomas. Matthieu, now staring down 257, is reflecting on his life, loves and priorities with the latest Tom, called Tommy.

The ending, while not completely surprising, is great and the bouncing from century to century is a great structure of slowly reveal the backstories of Matthieu and Dominique. Matthieu has a knack for meeting the right people at the right time (it's a novel, not biography after all!) and he takes us through the French Revolution, McCarthy's anti-communist hearings, Queen Victoria and the Crystal Palace, the crash of 1929, World War II, and countless other key historic events of the western world. I read a few reviews that didn't like the back-and-forth structure, but the story would have suffered terribly by following a more chronological path.

Boyne has written a number of novels, including The Boy in the Striped Pajamas about a friendship set in a concentration camp. I haven't read it but the title is familiar.