Book Review: ‘The Ministry of Time’

From the title to the plot, there’s very little original about Kaliane Bradley’s new novel The Ministry of Time. But originality is not what this charming debut has to offer.

Set in a highly recognizable London of the near future,  the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry have awkwardly set up a Ministry of Time. It has a larger remit, of course, but its immediate mission is to deal with the ramifications of a “time-portal” device that the British government has acquired.

In order to staff this new department, recruits arrive from around the civil service. That’s how the tantalizingly unnamed protagonist – and our first-person narrator – arrives from the unlikely source of the languages division of the Ministry of Defence. She is single while her friends are marrying; she’s mildly neurotic and relatable in a very Bridget Jones way.

A specialist in Eastern languages, her mother survived the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, reaching England and marrying her father “a white man.” Sometimes able to pass as white, she tells us, she recounts her whole mess of unresolved issues relating to her roots—exacerbated by her sister, a writer, trying to explore them in public.

At the very start of the book, her supervisor, Adela, lights upon her mother’s “refugee” status as a reason that she might be well suited for the job.  Bradley tells the novel in the first person and her response to this comment colors the rest of the book and elevates it from the basic romcom its blurbs threaten.

Adela knows, although in the interview our narrator does not, that the job is looking after the handsome, 37-year-old eligible bachelor Commander Graham Gore who the Ministry has rescued from death in an Arctic expedition in the 1840s. Picture Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and you have the general idea.

The featured staff of the Ministry of Time are “bridges” who cohabit with time-travelers to help them acclimatize and to report on their behavior to the ministry. They have nabbed these travelers from their own times, from points where history says that they already died at a relatively young, adult age.

Commander Gore is a handsome, charming man and his bridge becomes quite besotted with him, which makes the trajectory of the book somewhat predictable. However, Bradley intelligently poses the questions (and the difficult answers) that he, as well as the others from different eras, have about modern society and technology. What we are able to do by the early 21st century is bewildering to the time-travelers: Tinder and air travel are wonders.

Society, too, has moved on. Attitudes to race, gender, and sexuality have all changed, but not necessarily with the internal consistency that we might, smugly, think. Women’s rights have come on a fair bit since the 17th century, but not as consistently as we might think. LGBTQ rights likewise, although our rigidity of thought in the matter is perplexing to many of the “expats.”

So, for promotion purposes, one can describe this book as a Sci-Fi thriller romcom where Bridget Jones meets Mr Darcy and sets off to save history. But, though Bradley sets the book in a climate change-hit world rushing headlong into authoritarianism, the strength of the book is not in its pat politics, its thrilling plot, or its love story, but rather in its slowness and consideration of the people it narrates. Bradley is an author who is eager to listen to her characters.

Debut novels are often a labor of love and, as a result, are often unusually crafted. Rather than dispatching with the rom, the com, the stop-the-bomb in transactional ways, Bradley delays the action, keeping the reader engaged but in the same delightful suspense as her naive, confused, and somewhat agonized protagonist. Bradley spends nearly 400 pages exploring the insights of the time-travelers, her protagonist, and, most notably the behavior of the sly, socially adept naval commander, rescued (symbolically) from the ice, and the mores of our contemporary time as measured by history.

For all of us, just as for expats, time-travelers, colonial subjects, post-colonial citizens, “evolués” and refugees, the nature of belonging remains at issue. Where are people from? How do their families and upbringing shape them? How do we in society address difference and diversity — and how are the institutionalized ways of addressing them often inimical to true social cohesion?