The Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley

The problem with time travel in science fiction novels - or the fun with SF time travel adventures if you like - is that it has unforeseen consequences. Some writers choose to ignore the paradox it creates and just explore the opportunities it offers, others have their own strictly defined rules. Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time takes the consequences part of it all relatively seriously, but has fun with the concept at the same time. But then, if/when we have time travel, you would expect that the matter be taken very seriously, so seriously in fact that, as the title suggests, that the British government has set up a whole department to deal with the ramifications, approaching the matter cautiously, but at the same time not in a particularly ethical manner. That's the fun part. Unfortunately the rest of the novel has mixed ideas about how seriously the author wants to write about science-fiction or indulge in romantic fantasy.

Initially however there is much amusement in a Tom Holt fashion at the curiosities of British manners and the incompetence of its authorities to run anything successfully. When it comes to the discovery of a time portal, the sensible thing to do would be to proceed cautiously, which the top secret Ministry do here by recklessly bringing historical figures from the past into the present day to see what impact it has on the human psyche, although you suspect that they might have other purposes in mind as well. It's going to be quite a jolt for the subjects being brought from the past, or 'expats' as they are called, and as they struggle to adjust it doesn't look like too many of them are going to survive the mental trauma.

Each of the expats have been chosen because they are soon to die in the period they are from. If they are going to die anyway, it's not so much of a loss, and it will cause fewer temporal disturbances. To help them adjust, they are assigned an agent, known as a “bridge”, to monitor and guide them through the progress, hopefully with some of them not entirely losing their minds. 'Samples' are taken from 1646, 1665, 1793, 1847 and 1916. The narrator, a mixed race recruit from Languages, is assigned as bridge to 'forty-seven', First Lieutenant Graham Gore, an explorer on the HMS Erebus that along with the HMS Terror, lost all its crew on a failed expedition in the Arctic in the mid-nineteenth century.

There is some amusement in a Victorian era Royal Navy Officer's attempts to relate to his more liberated female bridge and her modern ways, which doesn't so much make fun of the politically backward racism and imperialist, sexist ways of the past, but serves rather to reflect the absurdity of our modern age back at us by viewing it through the eyes of the past. Confronted with television Gore remarks “You can send dioramas through the ether, and you've used it to show people at their most wretched.” “No one's forcing you to watch EastEnders”, is the comeback. 

The first half of the book spends a long time musing and amusing over these cultural differences and use of language, but it comes at the expense of really driving forward what you would think is the more interesting point of the discovery of a time machine and the use it is being put to. There are hints of seemingly minor and inexplicable problems, like the subjects not showing on scanner, the bridge's handler going silent, just enough for you to suspect that things are eventually going to go very wrong. After all, if you have a time machine in the present day to go back to the past, you can be fairly sure that they will have one in the future too. 

This kind of speculation remains very much in the background however, while the novel gets bogged down to diminishing returns in social interaction between the expats and the bridge getting hot under the collar sharing living quarters with a handsome heroic figure from the past. Even when serious incidents happen, they seem like just the backdrop to the progression of the novel into indulging what I felt were rather creepy bodice-ripper erotic fantasies about a real-life rugged naval officer from the 19th century shyly being introduced to the sexual inhibitions of the 21st century.

How much you will enjoy The Ministry of Time might then depend on what expectations you might have for it. If you are expecting a science-fiction time-travel adventure or the implications that playing with a time machine can have on future/past events, then this only really comes into play in a hurried reveal close to the conclusion. If you are looking to see some serious exploration of cultural differences between different time periods and their incompatibility, there are intriguing hints about the difficulties of feeling like we don't really fit in with the attitudes and behaviours of our own time period, but even this is somewhat under-developed. If you are happy though with the Romance category taking precedence over the Science-Fiction, then you might enjoy The Ministry of Time rather more than I did.

Reading notes: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is published by Sceptre on the 7th May 2024. My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance eBook copy for review. I note that this is the first time I've had to add a new category label for Romance (the closest suggestion in my existing labels was 'Necromancer' (for Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer), which could actually be considered appropriate here). By no means a favourite, I have read and enjoyed some books in that category, so either I haven't uploaded the archive reviews for them yet, or have just lumped them into General Fiction & Literature.