The Borrower

Neither a borrower nor a lender be, declares Polonius. Unfortunately his advice is hard to apply if you work in a library, as the narrator of Rebecca Makkai’s first novel does. No wonder she’s confused.

For Lucy Hull, indebtedness is a sensitive issue. After university, she could have travelled around Europe, paid for by her indulgent father, a dodgy Russian businessman. Instead, she ran away to become a children’s librarian in a dead-end Missouri town, which for the purposes of anonymity she decides to call Hannibal, a nod to Huckleberry Finn’s home town. Now 26, Lucy spends her days signing out copies of Fantastic Mr Fox and hosting story-times. She is a study in self-denial and, to only a slightly lesser extent, self-loathing.

Like many people who are lost, Lucy is looking for someone to save – a role performed by her most avid reader, 10-year-old Ian Drake. The son of evangelical Christians, Ian is forbidden from reading “inappropriate” books, which rules out pretty much the entire children’s canon. Lucy attempts to get round this parental prohibition by slipping him contraband copies of Roald Dahl. But when she discovers that he is being sent to a fundamentalist pastor to be cured of his perceived homosexuality, she can do nothing, and it’s this sense of impotence, perhaps, that leads her to make her life-changing mistake. When Ian turns up at the library with a knapsack, having run away, she opts not to take him home. Instead, like Huck and Jim before them, the two set out on a road trip that will eventually end in Vermont.

Who is kidnapping who here? One of the many likable things about The Borrower is its lack of sentimentality about childhood. No victim-angel, Ian is a skilful manipulator. Conversely, Lucy’s sense of her own adulthood is paper thin, her inner child a fragile, frightened thing. Central to this story is this ­inability to assume the authority that being a grown-up would once, automatically, have conferred.

Makkai’s novel is most generic when it attempts to deal with the Russo-American immigrant experience. Lucy’s father, the borderline gangster, never entirely transcends caricature; and his claim that Americans are so restless because they are a “nation of runaways” feels a little pat.

But as an addition to America’s long list of books about fictional fugitives, and a homage to children’s literature’s power to inspire, The Borrower is a tremendously entertaining read.

Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Book Festival

The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai, William Heinemann, RRP£12.99, 336 pages