Time is on His Side

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

“I don’t die. I just get older and older and older.”

So begins 256-year-old Matthieu Zéla’s strange, marvelous, almost Dickensian tale of his life and loves from his birth in Paris in 1743 to a year-long series of events involving his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Tommy, in 1999.

Taking a magical realist page from Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—where little Oskar decides to stop growing at age three—author John Boyne’s picaresque hero, Matthieu, stops aging at the end of the eighteenth century, retaining the look of a fifty-year-old man while appearing Zelig-like in events from the French Revolution and the Great Exhibition of London to the McCarthy hearings and the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Although Matthieu knew by the time he was 100 that “something unusual was occurring, by then he was learning to live with it.” Once he accepts his condition—“Why tempt fate?” he says—he wanders through life looking for love with a variety of women and failing to care for his nephews and grandsons, all of whom bear some form of the name Tomas or Tommy.

In 1999, after a life of simply going along wherever the river of his life carries him, Matthieu experiences an epiphany and undertakes a task that will change the direction of his life. “I’m 256 years old and I’ve sat back and watched nine of the Thomases die and done nothing at all to prevent any of these tragedies . . . I’ve accepted their fate as predestined . . . And here was another one in trouble and I’d still be here afterwards, waiting for the next one to be born . . . I would do something I should have done a long time ago—I would save one of the Thomases.”

Tommy DuMarqué, soap opera star, coke addict, and general ne’er do well, first appears in Matthieu’s life seeking money to pay loan sharks. Tommy’s often sordid life draws Matthieu into an underworld of pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Maddening as Tommy’s behavior is to Matthieu—Tommy involves his “uncle” in a murder, he impregnates at least two of his girlfriends and leaves them, and he begs mercilessly for money from his “uncle”—Matthieu endures all of it because his mission is to save this Tommy from the fate of all the rest of them—death. In the end, Matthieu “gets it right because Tommy is alive.”

Matthieu leads us through his life in three interlocking tales. Boyne seamlessly weaves the stories of Matthieu’s early life and his enduring though hopeless love for a woman named Dominique, the events of his more public life as architect, entrepreneur, and television writer and producer, and the tales of his year-long mission to rescue Tommy.

Yet, in spite of moments of humor and charm, The Thief of Time (St. Martin’s Press; $24.95), plods along without a compelling center. Matthieu is a one-dimensional character whose choices are as mysterious as his aging. He simply accepts his fate as he goes through life and seldom reflects on the consequences or the moral nature of his actions. Even his decision to save Tommy seems capricious rather than heartfelt or deeply moving. Matthieu is a consummate actor who must announce to the world his good deed in order for the world—and to convince himself—to believe that he is a good man. In short, he is a hollow man with whom we have little sympathy and for whom we feel no emotion.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it