I saw a recommendation for Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, and I got it from the interlibrary loan in amongst some verrrrryyyy long books (Why does nobody edit Brandon Sanderson?!?). I couldn’t contemplate bringing a 5lb book on the plane, so grabbed Bradley’s novel thinking it was the right length for a 3 day work trip. What happened, in the end, was me having to caution myself to slow down so I would have enough book to last the whole trip – this funny, sexy, thoughtful sci-fi novel made me want to call in sick so I could sit in the hotel room and just read.
The Ministry of Time sees the English government experimenting with a time machine. They use it to bring people from the past into the modern day, selecting people who were going to die immediately so as to avoid any suspicion or unforeseen consequences. After some initial treatment, each person gets assigned to a “bridge,” an agent who lives with them and is responsible for supporting and trying to integrate them into modern day society. The novel focuses on two in particular – Graham Gore, an explorer from the doomed Franklin expedition and an unnamed woman who has been working as a translator for the government but is desperate to be something more. Over the course of a year, their relationships evolve and the tension grows.
This book was a very compelling read for me. The sci-fi elements were pretty light, with not much time given to the way it all works, which is fine. It had some genuinely funny moments, as you might expect from a book that sees bureaucrats try to acclimatize traumatized people from the 17th century into 21st century London. Bradley had been kind of obsessed with the Franklin expedition during COVID and with Gore in particular, and the story started out as fan-fics; you can see the benefits of that with some really compelling yearning and some pretty great romantic scenes as well. However, the more I sit with this book, the more I think it is really about identity and narrative. What does it really mean to be a refugee, what will you give up in order to belong, where does colonialism begin and end, how can you control the the future, what happens when you treat people as if they are a hobby? There are a lot of big questions in this novel and I cannot wait to see the film/television adaptation that is coming.
