The Ministry of Time
by Kaliane Bradley
16 July 2024
This was fabulous, just the sort of wild romping tale that I was in the mood for. We’re in a near future version of the UK, every bit as dystopic as you might expect plus we’ve got hold of some kind of time travel door which (heavy sarcasm) is obviously going to simplify matters. Our unnamed narrator gets a job looking after one of a selection of characters plucked from history to arrive in modern - well near future - London. The person she’s looking after is Graham Gore who was a real arctic explorer presumed dead in 1847ish.
The book is great, and often hilarious, at showing how Gore and the other ‘expats’ from other times adapt to modern life. It wasn’t clear when I was reading whether the other characters from history were all real people or not - a quick web search makes me think not but I might be wrong. Either way their characters will be mostly invented and they are great inventions. I was particularly fond of Maggie who came from the Great Plague of London but fitted in perfectly as a film-obsessed modern lesbian. The interactions between the characters from different times who come with different expectations and attitudes are lovely. And that’s before you even get to the romance that blossoms between characters put in close quarters with each other, which could have been the whole point of the book but is just a part of the wider story.
What was worrying me as I read was how on earth the author was going to manage to end the book. It was an excellent middle that made me expect to be let down by a bumpy ending. But I wasn’t. Underneath all the fun and danger there’s a more serious undertone lurking, as there often is when time travel is used in fiction, not just about whether we can change the past or the future but a wider story about the politics of space and time and forcibly moving people about that resonates even in a world without time travel. I really enjoyed the book and was pleased with the ending. This is Bradley’s debut novel and I worry a bit that this is so expansive and clever that it will be hard to follow up but I hope to read more books of hers in the future (I don’t think I’ll use time travel to get to it though!).
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