Time travel stories usually follow the exploits of someone rocketing through time to change history. This person ponders the various time travel paradoxes or wrestles with the implications of an ever-splitting multiverse. All of which is to say that Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is a unique look at the perils of time travel. Instead of travelers deliberately injecting themselves into history, a mysterious British Agency has used a recovered time machine to “rescue” five Britons from the past from their inevitable deaths by pulling them into a future ravaged by climate change. Our narrator is one of the few civil servants in on the secret, selected to help acclimate one of the “expats” to life in the twenty-first century.
The narrator of The Ministry of Time isn’t a traveler herself and, like the other “bridges, only knows what the higher-ups grudgingly dole out about time travel and their expats. It’s unclear whether the other expats are actual historical figures but our protagonist’s expat is. In our timeline, Commander Graham Gore died with Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition in the Arctic sometime between May 1847 and April 1848. His body was never recovered. In the narrator’s timeline, Gore was whisked away from certain death from hypothermia and starvation, given intensive medical care, and turned loose to our narrator after a crash course in modern culture for polishing in the finer points. Four other Brits were also pulled out of time: one from death in battle during the English Civil War, another from the Great Plague of 1665, one from the Reign of Terror, and one last one from the Battle of the Somme.
Because The Ministry of Time isn’t the usual highwire act of getting to places at the right moment or untangling the skeins of time, much of the book is meditative and often funny as our protagonist and Gore muddle over the changes two hundred-ish years have wrought on the world. Gore gets in trouble for slaughtering all of the squirrels in the back garden and shudders at the free-wheeling dating scene. The protagonist does her best to explain why it would be weird for them to have servants to clean up after and cook for them, as well as what Auschwitz was, why the world is so very hot and battered by incredible storms, and what happened to his companions after he “left” the Franklin Expedition. It’s little wonder that Graham seeks refuge with his other expats when the sheer scale of change gets to him.
Our dutifully writes up daily reports for her bosses but it’s clear that, before long, she starts to wonder if her bosses’ experiments are on the up and up. The anomalies pile up after her immediate supervisor disappears after asking some pointed questions. Our protagonist reluctantly picks up the thread of those questions when it’s clear she’d much rather spend time with Graham. Those questions are irresistible, however. The last third of The Ministry of Time races as our protagonist digs into the big secrets the Ministry is hiding from her and from the expats.
I usually like a tense plot but I rather enjoyed the slower parts of this book. I loved Gore and our protagonist’s meditations on culture and customs. The premise of this book is a rare chance to think about what we do just because of tradition or because of changing social mores. Do we really know better now? In the case of vitamin C as a prevention for scurvy, absolutely—but when it comes to war? Perhaps not, as Gore discovers to his horror after reading about the first and second world wars. I particularly enjoyed the care Bradley gave to creating authentic speech for the expats. Margaret Kemble (late of 1665) frequently made me laugh with her pointed observations, even if it took me a minute to adjust to what I perceived as archaic, almost Shakespearean phrasing.
I could quibble about some of the messiness of the plotting—especially in the last third—but I was captivated by this book. Bradley does such amazing work with her characters that I fell in love with them within chapters (with some notable exceptions). I ended up reading this book in one day because I just couldn’t put it down. I hope other fans of time travel novels enjoy this original story as much as I did.