Review: The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The general level of historical awareness among many of today's writers is... frankly woeful. So it's refreshing to read a book like this.

The premise is that the British Government has formed a secret Ministry of Time because they have got hold of a Time Door from the future, and they've used it to bring a few carefully selected people to the 21st century from their own (earlier) times, where they were missing, presumed dead. This includes Graham Gore, an actual historical figure who was lost on a disastrous polar expedition in the late 1840s, along with a World War I officer, a soldier from a 17th-century battle, and two women, one of whom came from the Great Plague of London in the 1660s. The other plays little role, and I've unfortunately forgotten her details already.

They're assigned "bridges," officers of the Ministry whose responsibility is to acclimate them to the 21st century with a view to making them useful, and the never-named first-person narrator is Gore's bridge. Like the author, she is half Cambodian but able to pass for white, and I suspect that at least some, and probably most, of the very specific experiences and details she includes in the narrative are the author writing what she knows.

This in itself would be promising: a modern woman with an uncommon background interacting with a Victorian naval officer. But the execution takes that promise and develops it more fully than I had any right to expect.

Firstly, the inner lives and relationships and interactions of the characters are beautifully observed and unflinchingly portrayed. As a matter of personal taste, I wished the author had flinched a bit more than she did; most of the last third of the novel is pretty dark, darker than I prefer, and I almost dropped it from five to four stars because of that. It is really well done, though, so I couldn't bring myself to penalize it for achieving what it set out to do so well, even if I didn't personally enjoy that part much.

Part of why it's so well done is hinted at in my opening sentence of this review. A lot of 21st-century authors (looking straight at you, Casey Blair) feel obliged to recite whatever the current orthodox credo of progressivism is, right in the middle of their novels supposedly set in a very different society in a secondary world. Kaliane Bradley is smarter and more nuanced than that; she knows that the values of the 2020s are not inherently the peak of history and better than all values coming from every other place and time, and that they too have their problems, contradictions, weaknesses and pitfalls. And she doesn't just tell us this, she shows us. Gore, for example, summarizes dating as "like trying on clothes for fit, except the clothes are people," which is as devastating a short critique as I've ever seen.

There's a lot of fine imagery scattered through the book, in fact, though not in a self-indulgent or overdone way; it adds to the vividness, it doesn't sit there drawing attention to itself for its own sake. The speech of the 17th-century woman rings true to me, too, and I've spent a bit of time studying 17th-century literature, admittedly many years ago now. In fact, the author's grasp of language is at a level that I rarely see, and I noticed few errors in the pre-publication version I got from Netgalley for review (the worst being "sojourn" used to mean "journey," which is the opposite of what it means - but that's a very common mistake).

Intelligent, well crafted, moving, nuanced and insightful, this book goes straight to the Platinum tier of my Best of the Year list.

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