WASHINGTON POST:

‘The Ministry of Time’ is part thriller, part romance and a lot of fun
Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel wonders if a woman from the present can make a future with a man from the past

Review by Ron Charles

We’ll never know exactly what happened, but the hoary remains are terrifying enough.

In 1845, more than 120 men under the command of Sir John Franklin set out on two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, in search of the Northwest Passage. They reached the Canadian Arctic, but then their vessels got caught in crushing ice for almost two years. Weakened by scurvy, tuberculosis and lead poisoning, the survivors began walking back to the mainland, hundreds of miles away. They froze, starved, raved. Marks on a few scattered bones suggest some resorted to cannibalism. In the blinding white at the end of the world, all were lost.

Until now.

A secret program developed by the British government has managed to extract one of the missing officers, 1st Lt. Graham Gore, and return him to life in the modern age.

Some of what you’ve just read is historical fact, some is archaeological speculation, and a bit is wacky fantasy. I won’t tell you which is which, but I promise all those elements are blended deliciously in Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, “The Ministry of Time.” From a little DNA scraped off the footnotes of polar exploration, she’s re-engineered a courageous, irresistible man who vanished almost 200 years ago.

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You’re skeptical; I don’t blame you. So far as we know, time travel is more written about than embarked upon. And too many of those stories get tangled up in causal loops, timeline dilemmas and grandfather paradoxes. In fact, if I could travel back in time, one of the things I’d do, after strangling baby Hitler and buying Apple stock, would be to tell younger me not to waste time reading so many novels about time travel.

But Bradley has got me rethinking that prejudice. Her utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre. Imagine if “The Time Traveler’s Wife” had an affair with “A Gentleman in Moscow.” No wonder the manuscript for “The Ministry of Time” sold in dozens of markets around the world faster than the speed of light.

The story is narrated by an unnamed woman who gets a lucrative job in a top-secret government agency dealing with high-value refugees. “I didn’t know from whence they were fleeing,” she notes. “I’d assumed politically important defectors from Russia or China.”

But the question is not whence, but when. The newly established Ministry has figured out how to expatriate people from the past. To avoid causing temporal chaos in the future, the first batch of time travelers are people who were just about to die, doomed folks plucked from “historical war zones, natural disasters and epidemics.” As you might imagine, these expats arrive in the present day wildly discombobulated. Some don’t survive the journey, and those who do have a hard road ahead. So much has changed in the present day that acclimation isn’t easy. The antique refugees need careful instruction about how to dress, speak and behave in modern London.

Only after the narrator has passed through multiple interviews and accepted the job does she learn that she’ll be working as one of these guides, or “bridges,” as they’re called. She’s been assigned to help Cmdr. Graham Gore, an officer snatched from the Franklin expedition just before the rest of his crew succumbed to the horror.

“If you have any questions,” she tells him, “please feel free to ask. I appreciate that this is a lot to take in.”

“I am delighted to discover,” he says, “that, even in the future, the English have not lost the art of ironic understatement.”

Over the next few months, we watch Gore “fill out with attributes like a daguerreotype developing.” Initially, much of the comedy here stems from his stiff-upper-lip astonishment at the world’s technological innovations. In utter wonderment, he flushes the toilet 15 times. He stares at airplanes not quite believing. He completely rejects the proposition that the world is full of microscopic germs.

“I won’t be participating,” he announces.

“You don’t have a choice,” his bridge tells him.

“I will write a strongly worded letter of complaint.”

You’d need a nuclear-powered flux capacitor to generate more charisma than Gore. “He was, above all things, a charming man,” Bradley writes. “In every century, they make themselves at home.” His banter with the narrator crackles off the page. Language and all its slippery evolutions are a source of endless amusement to them both. (The folks currently adapting Bradley’s novel for the BBC should be banished to the Middle Ages if they dare to meddle with even a word of this dialogue.)

When the narrator refers to a “foxy” extant photo that Gore had taken before the Franklin expedition, he says, “I assume, by ‘foxy,’ you are referring to the size of my snout in that portrait.”

“‘Foxy’ in this context means — eh — alluring.”

“Can you swim?” he asks.

“What?”

“If I push you in the river, will it be murder?”

The handsome, 37-year-old officer is shocked, in his own ironic way, to hear that he and his bridge have been assigned to live together: a man and an unmarried woman! Even sitting with her in a pub, behaving with strict Victorian decorum, he finds “very daring and mischievous and kept smiling … as if we were getting away with a visionary practical joke.” He’s equally amused and scandalized by the casual way people discuss the most intimate matters — “The dreadful secularism of this age”! That revolting phrase “having sex”!

Even if you can’t travel ahead in time, you probably know what’s coming — or think you do.

So, basically, “Outlander” with modern plumbing? Not exactly.

What feels initially like a time-traveling romance soon turns on curious questions about the possibility of moral progress. From the narrator’s enlightened position, how easy it is to regard Gore’s 19th-century attitudes about race with a mixture of pity and condescension. But when Gore runs across a description of the Holocaust, nothing Steven Pinker might argue in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” can rationalize the arc of history.

Gradually, as the novel’s carbonated humor fizzes away, sharper elements protrude. Unsurprisingly, the Ministry of Time is something more sinister than a benevolent government department dedicated to resettling time-traveling refugees. And aside from those spy thriller elements, the novel also digs deep into what it means to be out of time and out of place.

Grieving the loss of all his comrades, adrift on “the ocean of sadness he had dammed and kept damming,” Gore struggles to imagine a role for himself in a post-colonial world. The narrator, meanwhile, reflects on the displacement endured by her mother, who barely escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In a sense, both the narrator and Gore must pretend to live at peace in a world that is out of sequence with their pasts. The narrator feels her Cambodian heritage always hovering around in the ways others regard her — from racist slurs to pitying allusions to the killing fields.

Admittedly, Bradley is not a tidy writer. This plot eventually starts to shake like a Radio Flyer wagon traveling at DeLorean speeds. But by then nothing matters but the fate of this asynchronous couple brought together across cultures and eras.

Can a 21st-century British-Cambodian woman really find love with a 19th-century officer of the British navy?

Readers, I envy you: There’s a smart, witty novel in your future.

I listened to 50% of this and I was just done. I couldn't do it anymore. I love a time traveling concept, but just couldn't get into this one. I loved the beginning and her helping the guy after time traveling and explaining how things are now. But everything else was just too confusing. Maybe because I listened on audiobook I missed some vital parts? Every other chapter, I don't know who was narrating that, but it was boring as hell whoever it was. I think I spaced out during all of those. I only liked her perspective. And then after awhile, I just didn't care what happened, so I gave up and moved on. Maybe I'll try to read this one instead of audiobook and it will make a difference because other people seem to enjoy it, so maybe I'm missing something? ( )

Our narrator (whose name we never learn) is applying for a top-secret role in the Ministry of Defence in London, where she has previously been working as a translator. So secret that she can't be told exactly what the role is until she is successful:

‘Your mother was a refugee, wasn’t she?’ she said, which is a demented way to begin a job interview...

‘She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee,’ I added. ‘It’s been quite weird to hear people say that.’
‘The people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term. We prefer “expat”. In answer to your question, I’m the Vice-Secretary of Expatriation.’ ‘
And they are expats from … ?’
‘History.’
‘Sorry?’
Adela shrugged. ‘We have time-travel,’ she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. ‘Welcome to the Ministry.’

In order to avoid accidentally changing the past by removing people who still have a part to play, what the Ministry has done is to collect a number of people from the past who were about to die very imminently, soldiers from the English Civil War and the First World War, a woman from the time of the Great Plague, and in particular, Commander Graham Gore, a member of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, who all died in the Arctic at some time around 1847. The narrator is assigned to Commander Gore as a 'bridge', someone to help the ex-pats come to terms with the twenty-first century. But as her year long assignment continues, the narrator finds herself gradually falling in love ...

This book had rave reviews, and I was expecting great things from it. And it did start well, but the romance element didn't quite ring true and it went downhill rapidly in the final third. I found the ending deeply unsatisfactory. I really don't understand all the hype. ( )

I was excited to read this as the premise is brilliant. Sadly, I found it a bit of a dud. The story got progressively less engaging and incorporated a “twist” I found trite, and the middling resolution made the whole story weaker. No characters were particularly engaging and I found the arctic chapters and the musings of the main character more of a distraction than an enhancement. I didn't particularly care for the writing style, and also lampshading something doesn't magically make it not bad. All told, an ok read but not a book for me. ( )

I've never really had much faith in the output of the contemporary publishing industry, which has always seemed to prioritise formulaic, repackaged pulp, workshopped, self-congratulatory guff and the racial, gender, sexual or celebrity identity of authors over unfashionable things like quality of writing, depth of thought, self-respect and the awareness of objective standards. But every so often in my reading I will tear myself away from the higher-calibre writing and mores of previous generations to try something of the current year that seems compelling or has been lauded. Whenever I do so, it's always with vain but genuine hope that I will find something of real worth. But even though the industry encourages and cultivates a battery-farm of middling, formulaic, identity-driven Creative Writing and YA dreck that people depressingly and unthinkingly process as 'consumers' rather than as 'readers', it still staggers me when I think of how many writers manage to whack their heads against a bar set so low.

Kaliane Bradley is the latest to sport a bump on her forehead; when she writes of the enthusiastic tweeting "about debut authors of colour who never seemed to publish second novels once the publicity cycle ended" (pg. 181), she is writing (hopefully with some self-awareness) about the climate in which she was able to bring about her own recent offering: the disappointing The Ministry of Time. The fatal flaw in the book is that it tries to be three completely different things at once: a meet-cute romance, a speculative sci-fi story and a mysterious thriller. It fails at all three, and that's before you also add in the book's half-hearted attempt to work through the protagonist's angst over her mixed Anglo-Cambodian heritage.

'Half-hearted' is the key word here, or perhaps 'unfocused'; The Ministry of Time doesn't satisfy from any of the angles it attempts. The speculative sci-fi angle is the most disappointing, and the laziest. Author Kaliane Bradley makes no attempt to construct an internal storytelling logic, telling the reader as early as page five: "don't worry about it. All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time…" She sticks to this brazen lack of storytelling care throughout the book; the time-travel device is merely described as "some kind of machine" that creates a glowing blue door (pg. 198). That Bradley has enough self-awareness to describe the blue door as "a low-production cliché" (pg. 323), just as she began that early page-five caveat by admitting the logic of time-travel is "a crock of shit", in no way makes it acceptable that the author isn't bothering to adequately put together the ingredients of a story. Readers, even readers who lap up this low-grade stuff, deserve better.

This time-travel plot unravels later in the novel when Bradley clumsily tries to liven things up by turning The Ministry of Time into a thriller. Apparently, there are time-travellers from the future who are "trying to change history" (pg. 308) by disrupting the Ministry. Their motives are never expanded upon. What's worse is that the characters we have been spending time with – the unnamed protagonist, Graham Gore, and their friends – are rather underwhelmingly written too, so when the stakes are raised artificially high in the book's final third, we feel no jeopardy and little interest.

But it is the romance angle which most embarrassingly fails to spark, as it was the book's raison d'être. Bradley has said she got the idea for the book after coming across a photo of Graham Gore, an officer who died in the Arctic on the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845. The author thought he was attractive, and so wrote this story: one in which a protagonist (who is a blatant and undisguised author-insert) finds Gore has been brought into her own time and he falls in love with her. It reads like fan-fiction, and apparently started off as that. You look at the commissioning of such rubbish from our publishing industry and it makes you want to throw up your hands.

One inconvenient problem is that this plot scenario has already been done better elsewhere (it's literally the same plot as the Richard Matheson novel Bid Time Return, made into a good film called Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve). Another is that, in Bradley's incapable hands, it is uncomfortable to see the abuse to Gore's character. Matheson in his novel was inspired by an old photo of a beautiful woman but only based his story's object of devotion on her, creating a new character; Bradley, instead, takes the real-life Gore and has him dance like a puppet. What's the problem, you might think, surely that's the bread-and-butter of historical fiction? I agree, to an extent, but I was troubled when Bradley, on zero evidence and seemingly to satisfy her own fantasies and worldview, has her Gore 'admit' to being bisexual and making love to men on sea voyages (pg. 245). When Bradley describes, at length, Gore giving oral sex to her author-avatar protagonist (pp240-1), it began to seem a bit, well, unethical.

You may feel such a charge is harsh. Certainly, I think the minor palaver that has bubbled up online over whether Bradley plagiarised a 2014 Spanish TV show with the same title as her book (and a similar concept) to be a storm in a teacup; both plot and title are generic enough that they could have (and probably were) reached independently. But Gore was no historical figure, at least not in the way that Churchill or Napoleon were. He was a seaman, a regular man whose name is only remembered because he died, along with all of his companions, on an infamous Arctic expedition. Imagine, for a moment, if a couple of hundred years from now someone found a photo of you – for you, like Gore, would be an ordinary person – and created a story in which you fellated them and told them how much you liked it. It would seem wrong; you would not be affected, of course, being dead, but it would still seem wrong for a person, a writer, to take you like that. For Bradley to take the real-life Gore (who died tragically, let us remember, probably of starvation) and describe how he "worked well" smothered between the wet thighs of her author-insert protagonist (pg. 241) seems to be the only depth this otherwise-superficial book will plumb.

But enough on that; the book itself is poor, and that is where it can be more reliably judged, not on my perhaps hair-trigger sense of ethics. Characterisation is often superficial and the writing veers between sketchy and mealy-mouthed, betraying its fan-fic origins. The plot, little more than a sketch as it is, obliterates itself by pulling into vastly different directions – sci-fi, thriller and romance – and lacking the wit to satisfy any one of them. Bradley had good potential in the concept of a straight-laced Victorian man thrown into the undisciplined, Millennial vapidity of the current year, but fails to mine either the fish-out-of-water situation-comedy of this (despite a few half-hearted attempts), or the more sobering pathos of it. To the bafflement of his sloppy Millennial 'handler', Gore exercises, attends church on Sundays and knows their neighbours' names. One almost-rewarding passage of the book demonstrates the potential here, and also how the author threw it away:

"Gore was bored, that much was clear. Despite the amenities and pleasures of the twenty-first century, he was bored. He had been handed a plush-lined life, with time to read, to pursue thoughts to their phantasmagoric end, to take in whole seasons at the British Film Institute, to walk for miles, to master sonatas and paint to his heart's content. He did not need to work, to exchange the sweat of his brow or the creak of his mind for board and bed. And yet, he was bored of having no purpose. He was getting bored of everything. I was afraid that he was getting bored of me." (pg. 61)

Up until that final sentence, that passage demonstrates what The Ministry of Time could have been; the Victorian man who is brought into a supposedly more enlightened time only to find that people are miserable, depressed, lazy, and lacking purpose in a world where every luxury is easy and at our fingertips. In short, it could have been a useful mirror to shine on our own society, an opportunity to reflect on whether the lives we live in this modern world have the integrity and dignity for which our souls crave. Instead, in that final line of the passage, Bradley drags The Ministry of Time back down to what it is: the indulgence of its author/protagonist's neuroses, and the shallow depiction of her sexual and romantic fantasy. It's squandering like this which is why I so often turn my back on the hardbacks that the hype machine assures me are new masterpieces of culture. I feel myself like a man out of my time. ( )