The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time.
There’s a moment in The Ministry of Time when we learn a main character loves a book so much, he is reading it for a second time. That more or less sums up my experience of Kaliane Bradley’s wonderful first novel. I loved The Ministry of Time, and immediately after I completed my first read I returned to page one and dug in again.
The Ministry of Time takes place in the near future. The British government has just discovered time travel and decides to pluck a handful of people from the past - men and women who died during tumultuous times in British history - and bring them to the present. The Ministry refers to them as ‘expats’, as in, expats from time. What can they learn from the expats, and about the effects of time travel? Unknown to them, the expats are guinea pigs in a scientific experiment, but, as the Ministry’s cold logic goes, they were going to die in their own time anyway. Will the expats survive?
The main character – we never learn her name – is hired to live with one of these expats for a year, in a shared house, paid for by the British government. Commander Graham Gore was one of the naval officers on the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find the Northwest passage. Things go about as well as you’d expect for them at first, a Victorian-era man propelled two hundred years into the future to become a housemate with an unmarried woman, who has, gasp, a university degree and a high-level job and who wears skirts that end far above the ankle. At first, Gore abhors the idea of modern life, but he slowly adapts and the two discover they have a great deal in common. You can guess what happens next – they begin to fall in love. But they can’t act on their feelings. Gore is constrained by his beliefs about how unmarried men and women should act in each other’s company. And our main character is constrained by a secret she must keep or she’ll lose her job and with that, her access to Gore. Gore knows the government has hired her to be his guide, or ‘bridge’ to modern life, but he doesn’t know part of her duties are to spy on him.
Into this mix, Bradley introduces a major plot twist. I won’t spoil it for you, but I sure didn’t see it coming! (One of the many reasons I was impelled to re-read the book.)
At the end of the day, the book mines a lot of troubling issues, asking questions to which there are no easy answers. To what end humanity’s ceaseless quest for new scientific and technological development? Does anyone have the ability, or the right, to define what is good for the whole of humanity? What does it mean to fight for love?
It's a spy novel. It’s a love story. It’s science fiction.
It’s also a brilliantly constructed, sexy page turner. It’s funny, it’s sad, and above all, I found Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time a pleasure to read (and re-read).