The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley review: a time-travelling treat with problems
“He was, above all things, a charming man. In every century they make themselves at home.” Which, in the case of Graham Gore, a Victorian naval commander plucked from a doomed polar expedition to a near-future London, means learning how to ride a motorbike (in leathers), use Google (“what is miso paste?”) and cook pho (if not quite pronounce it).
It also means falling in love with his housemate –– a civil servant helping him adjust to his new era on behalf of the Ministry of Time, the shadowy government department that lends its name to Kaliane Bradley’s witty, thrilling and enormously ambitious debut novel. Her ambition was shared by publishers — 21 bid for the book — and the BBC, which already has an adaptation in the works.
She sets her story in a version of 2020s London almost but not quite the same as our own. The government has stumbled upon a means of travelling through time; now it is working out whether humans can survive it by taking five “expats” from their own eras and bringing them to the future.
Gore, a real Arctic explorer lost on a mission to find the Northwest Passage in the 1840s, is one of them. Each is assigned a civil servant, or “bridge”, who will live with them for a year and teach them how to assimilate into modern society. Gore’s bridge, a sardonic, self-deprecating and never-named translator, is our narrator.
The attraction and dislocation between the two, separated as they are by two centuries, sets the tone of the tale, billed as part romance, part comedy, part sci-fi.
On top of that genre mash-up it dances, sometimes precariously, between being a powerfully drawn love story, an insider’s takedown of murky bureaucracy, an action thriller and an earnest analysis of topics that don’t get much space in, say, The Time Traveller’s Wife – climate change; racism; the refugee crisis; the British empire; genocide.
It is, as the bridge would say, a lot. In fact, it’s so full of ideas that occasionally it feels as though about four books are fighting to get out at once. It helps that Bradley swiftly dismisses the sci-fi nuts and bolts of time travel – “How does it work?... I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it” – to focus on what works best: the romance and the fish-out-of-water comedy.
I could have read pages more of Gore and the other expats; pages fewer of the narrator’s sometimes internet-level humour
Much of the latter comes from the pair’s enforced domesticity and their chemistry as they quarrel over the progress (or not) of idiom and culture. Him, on opening a fridge for the first time: “Carrots still exist, then. Cabbage too. How will I recognise milk?” Her, on introducing Gore to Spotify: “It didn’t seem like it would be kind to play Kate Bush.”
The camaraderie between Gore and two of his fellow expats – one a 17th-century woman who escaped the Great Plague of London and delights in her unexpected second act of selfies, dating apps and The Simpsons, the other a First World War captain who develops a taste for minigolf and disco – will be pleasingly familiar to anyone who has seen BBC comedy Ghosts, and provides some of the funniest and most moving parts of the novel. Yet, swashbuckling as Gore is, Bradley also vividly paints his loneliness and sense of fractured displacement. He is a refugee – from time – and has left behind all he has ever known and cannot go back. The bridge understands this all too well: her mother is a refugee from place – she fled the Cambodian genocide – and the trauma shaped both their lives. Bradley’s deeper point in the novel is to illuminate the inconsolable pain of being a refugee: of knowing your home is gone forever.
All of this – the romance, the comedy, the unpacking of what it means to be a refugee – is immensely enjoyable and thought-provoking. I could have read pages more of Gore and the other expats; pages fewer of the narrator’s sometimes internet-level humour.
The book falters a little when the sci-fi returns towards the end, and it gets bogged down in the intricacies of the ministry’s bureaucracy. Sometimes the whole thing threatens to collapse under the weight of its many genres and concerns. But, like the couple on Gore’s motorbike as they flee two agents from the future in east London (yes, really), sometimes you just have to close your eyes and hang on. It’s a fun ride.
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre, £16.99) is published next Tuesday
Fiona Roberts-Moore is the Evening Standard’s assistant editor (production)
