James Nicoll Reviews

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a stand-alone time travel novel.

Commander Graham Gore was just one of the hapless explorers in the Franklin Expedition¹, which was attempting to find a Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. He appears in the history books as one of the casualties of the ill-fated expedition. In this novel he is given an afterlife… of sorts.

The Ministry has come in to possession of a time gate. One can hardly fail to use such a wonder, but it wouldn’t be prudent to do so without some experimentation to see precisely how this time travel thingie works. Step one: retrieve people from the past, to see how time travel affects them.

Not being complete idiots, the Ministry selects as its experimental subjects people whose temporal displacement will not affect history, which is to say people who history records as having died under circumstances in which an absent body would not be noted. The five lucky souls snatched away from certain death are:

• Thomas (retrieved from the 1645 Battle of Naseby)
• Margaret (retrieved from the 1665 Great Plague of London)
• Anne (retrieved from the 1793 Terror)
• Graham (retrieved from the 1847 Franklin Expedition)
• Arthur (retrieved from the 1916 Battle of the Somme)

In its wisdom, the Ministry decides that once the initial shock of having been ripped out of history fades, the subjects should be integrated into 21^st century British society. To this end, each subject is provided with a guide, or in Ministry vernacular, a bridge.

A Cambodian British translator accepts an eyewatering salary to act as Commander Graham Gore’s mentor. Graham is very much a man of his time, a fellow who believes it is Britain’s right to invade and loot all the nations of the world, a man with firm views on the proper roles of men and women, not to mention the various races. Graham is also handsome and incredibly charming. The experience of sharing her home with Graham is not entirely unpleasant. In fact, it is very pleasant.

Alas, the world is not content to leave the bridge and her charge alone to explore the possibilities of an inter-temporal, inter-cultural romance. The time gate is an invaluable treasure. The Ministry’s rivals scheme to infiltrate the Ministry and gain control of the gate.

And should Ministry personnel or their charges prove impediments? They’ll just have to die.

~oOo~

Well, this will be an interesting exercise in avoiding egregious spoilers. A lot more went on in this book than I can tell you.

The Franklin Expedition looms very large in Canadian history, inspiring as it did many subsequent expeditions to determine what happened to it, thus facilitating the mapping of the North.

(I just realized that the doomed expedition headed off just twenty years before Canadian Confederation. That makes it practically modern day!)

I was also surprised to find that one of the sources that inspired this novel was AMC’s TV series The Terror, which in its turns was inspired by Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror. Which I have neither read nor reviewed. I wonder if I should….

There are two main plot threads: the bridge’s relationship with Graham and the espionage plot. I’m afraid the espionage plot just didn’t work for me. The Ministry seemed to have some odd blind spots, plus some of the characters persisted in courses of action whose outcome seemed doomed to produce undesirable results. How I miss the days when I could berate such developments as implausible².

I enjoyed the romance plot. Yes, a Cambodian Briton romancing a fellow whose views are literally Victorian is probably a bad idea… or at least one that will provide ample opportunities to surmount obstacles. Still, the participants, being adults, manage their circumstances better than those kids from Verona, and the tale is amusing told.

I mostly enjoyed this book. But judging by the impressive assortment of award nominations the novel has earned, other readers weigh plot and setting elements differently than I do. Will you be like me? or like those other folks? No way to find out except by reading the novel.

The Ministry of Time is available here (Hodder & Stoughton), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Thanks to inept preparation and worse leadership, the whole expedition died horribly. Fucking off into the arctic with crap supplies, unrealistic expectations, and worse plans is a tradition that lives into the modern day. See, for example, Paddle Across the Arctic for your guide on how to unnecessarily lose fingers and toes to frostbite.

2: The UK seems inordinately fond of time travel: there’s this book, the folks from Primeval, a certain Doctor who is obsessed with Britain in particular, some idiots from Oxford who get their hands on time travel, the dolts from St. Mary’s and more. The case that British people should be trusted with time machines is weak at best.

Although the above do better than the Americans in The Year of the Quiet Sun, (their research is a key element in USA Delenda). As well, the UK time travellers above do far better than the British Republics travellers in Andrew M. Stephenson’s The Wall of Years. They manage to break reality. Which is bad.

I would link to my review of The Wall of Years except it won’t go live for a couple of days and I don’t have access to a time machine. Probably for the best, all things considered.