This near-future science fiction adventure is a spy thriller, a romance, and a work of philosophy. THE MINISTRY OF TIME is a secret and intensely supervised department in London. A time door machine having been discovered, the Ministry is experimenting with how time travel affects the human body and mind. The principle of experimenting on people who were going to die anyway is applied by Vice-Secretary Adela. We learn that people are always people, no matter how far out of their time or home.
Naval Commander Graham Gore is plucked from an icy doom on the desperate Franklin expedition to discover a route through the Arctic. He is assigned a biracial British-Cambodian woman, who has previously worked as a translator, as his 'bridge'. They will spend a year as housemates, which the man from 1847 finds startling and compromising for a lady. Gore is based on a real personage, but the other subjects include a soldier from the Battle of the Somme, Arthur Reginald-Smyth, and a merchant woman from the Great Plague, Margaret Kemble. Margaret’s dialogue is cheerfully full of Shakespearean terms.
We don’t learn the translator’s name, which makes for some awkwardly written passages, but we meet her Cambodian family and learn about their country’s history and challenges. Having dealt with refugees and immigrants, she has to learn to call the arrival time ex-pats. Britain has an uneasy post-colonial conscience and explaining it to the ex-pats is done over difficult stages.
The shock of leaving everything and using TV, laptops and bicycles has a severe effect on some, and all does not go well. We also get chapters of the Franklin expedition’s diary, which the author Kaliane Bradley has built from what little is known about Gore, who had previously sailed with Darwin and climbed mountains. This emphasises the culture clash.
The centre section of the book is slow-paced and the drama occurs later. I did find myself asking questions like, why do we want to keep using something old? Are we using it as a time door to when we were younger? What would a government agency do with such a door? How would I cope as a time ex-pat? I also wondered if it is right to recreate an imagined version of a real person and assign them speech, motivations and romances, even though I’ve read historical crime stories; that were set in the past. THE MINISTRY OF TIME is an adult read, and I can’t figure out why, with all that’s going wrong in the bridge’s future, she still chooses to smoke. This is a thought-provoking book with some tropes, like forced proximity romance, and some refreshing new twists on the time travel theme.
A time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machine,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But he adjusts quickly; he is, after all, an explorer by trade. Soon, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a seriously uncomfortable housemate dynamic, evolves into something much more. Over the course of an unprecedented year, Gore and the bridge fall haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences they never could have imagined.
Supported by a chaotic and charming cast of characters—including a 17th-century cinephile who can’t get enough of Tinder, a painfully shy World War I captain, and a former spy with an ever-changing series of cosmetic surgery alterations and a belligerent attitude to HR—the bridge will be forced to confront the past that shaped her choices, and the choices that will shape the future.
An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks the universal question: What happens if you put a disaffected millennial and a Victorian polar explorer in a house together?
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