The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Publisher – Sceptre

Published – Out now

Price – £16.99 hardback £9.99 Kindle ebook

A BOY MEETS A GIRL. THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE. A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER. THE BEGINNING MEETS THE END. ENGLAND IS FOREVER. ENGLAND MUST FALL.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel.

Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' - Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

Time travel is a long fascination of science fiction with various time machines zipping back and forth in it; butterfly events changing it and the exploration of how we humans actually have changed. We tend to think of time as an absolute but there is a way to think of it as more changing perspectives. In Kaliane Bradley’s excellent thought-provoking science fiction novel The Ministry of Time a tale of a top secret science experiment is also used to explore our attitudes to refuges, racism and a need to fit in.

In the near future the UK government has got time travel. It’s the early days and a special government department has been set up to experiment and the initial idea is to explore the impact on the human body. For this the idea of the ‘expats’ has been proposed - people who history show are presumed dead but without any firm evidence. Groups have snared five who now live slightly culture shocked in labs. The next step is each will be assigned a bridge to live with them in the modern world help them adapt and observe their own health and behaviour. One ambitious young linguist is assigned Commander Graham Gore who was one of the many lost on the famous doomed Frankin Expedition of 1847. She has long been interested in him and this event and having him in the same house is a delight, shock and a challenge. They get to become friends and just a hint of more but now strange events in the Ministry are starting to put the agents and expats in danger and time travel is as much a threat as an opportunity.

The time travel aspect of the story is well played. Focusing less on the how but more the impact it creates. It is very experimental and being managed not by scientists but civil servants and touch of the intelligence services. There is a sense of immense power when we see it but contrasted with layers of reports, bureaucracy and purpose rathe than scientific discovery. The expats are more lab rats rather than viewed as chances to know history. We start to realise that time travel exists in the future too and a widening sense the group is being watched but for what purpose? It’s a slow burn with increasing tension but in the final third all these elements click together to create a dramatic finale and Bradley has created some effective time travel problems for their characters to navigate. I think SF fans will find this a familiar framing device and very well handled.

The crux of the tale for me is the expats and their bridges and in particular the unnamed narrator and her charge Gore; but we will also meet a WW1 soldier suffering from shellshock and a 17th century woman finding a world she can finally be herself in. The expats form a group calling each other nicknames based on the year they were taken in. Gore gets called 47. Bradley gets us to know and care about this central group. We get the standard culture shock of people finding out about electricity, the internet, social media, music and then subjects such as dating, cooking and even relationships. The clash of knowledge and morality is delivered very well but there is a wider theme developing that makes this a really interesting story.

Initially what we have are people we would immediately tend to think of as English stereotypes – a soldier, a smart feisty townswoman, a Victorian Explorer weirdly aspects we might think of as part of our history and yet Bradley cleverly explores these people also as immigrants arriving in the strange land of 21st century Britain. We get juxtaposition that several of them are not nearly as heterosexual as we tend to think; they are actually a mix of some who are violent; some who are embracing of our world, some who are depressed and enter back into their labs and we start to realise each is also traumatised by the way they’ve been taken or the experiences they themselves came from. The bridges are supportive but also duty bound to observe, control, monitor what the expats do and where they go. Some feel assimilated and some feel lost and its very hard as the story progresses not to realise that this story explores the way those immigrants today come to the UK with their own experiences and they rarely get seen as individuals but instead stereotyped, controlled and the experience of that itself is having drastic effects on the characters’ mental and physical health.

This then centres around the core romance between Gore and our unnamed narrator. Gore comes off the page a fascinating man, cultured, witty, kind and incredibly reserved rarely letting all his thoughts and emotions come out. In a series of flashbacks, we start to understand the experiences that have shaped the man we now see but we rarely get himself talk about it. With his flute, jokes, strange loves and dislikes he’s the character we get to know the most and we like him a lot. Our narrator is slightly in awe at first – a long fan of the polar expeditions finding history in her house. They bond – a love of secret cigarette smokes, jokes and they just get on n sync with one another with one realising she is falling for him hard,.

Intriguingly we find she is a second generation bi-racial immigrant whose mother comes from Cambodia at the time of the Khmer Rouge. She is very conscious of her race and history and the story explores why she has desired a career in the secret parts of government appeals. Ina world of micro-aggressions (she notes how few ever pronounce her name properly and hence why she never reveals it in her thoughts, trauma, racism and more is working/hiding in a powerful place a way to keep safe. We see the way her bosses almost treat her more as a hire to tick boxes rather than someone they actually respect. Which makes her ongoing desire to prove herself a growing source of puzzlement and potential conflict for the reader  which we slowly get to understand - integration is hard for her just as much as the expats and yet she is the modern day British citizen working for the government. On the one side she is a spy on the expats as well as a handler and yet she starts to see them as people and Gore and her have a special growing intense bond. One neither is keen to reveal to the other. The slow burn romance pulls off as we are invested as we do indeed want them to kiss but the Ministry is a huge ticking time bomb that could threaten this. The big question is can someone follow their head or heart. The emotional beats really hit in this book and when people make mistakes, we feel the shame and torment just as much as we feel the joy and smiles as they cross the pages. As our narrator looks back on events, she builds tension as to what the final outcome will be

I’m always fascinated when novels are marketed as one thing, but I get a different reading experience. Some have called this a screwball comedy romance with science fiction. While there is some humour in the clash of cultures it is not a laugh a minute; while there is romance it’s a lovely slow burn rather than annoying instalove and most of all this is a smart character focused science fiction novel that also explores attitudes in the UK towards immigrants and how those from immigrant communities of later generations feel too. Its full of interesting ideas and perspectives and was a delight to read. Very highly recommended!