{"id":10916,"date":"2025-08-15T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10916"},"modified":"2025-08-15T09:17:55","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T13:17:55","slug":"the-ministry-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/15\/the-ministry-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ministry of Time."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kaliane Bradley entered the crowded field of time-travel fiction last year with her debut novel The Ministry of Time<\/a><\/em>, earning a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and landing a coveted spot on Barack Obama\u2019s best-of-2024 list. It\u2019s a marvelous book that does this sort of fiction right: it\u2019s very light on the time-travel parts, and spends extremely little time worrying about the mechanics or the paradoxes, instead jumping off time travel for a story that is by turns philosophical, psychological, and quite romantic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator of The Ministry of Time<\/em> is a British-Cambodian woman, like Bradley, and has been working in various government agencies when she\u2019s tabbed for a special project as a \u2018bridge\u2019 to one of six people that the British government has plucked from history and brought to the present. There is a single time-travel door, and while the government hasn\u2019t mastered its use \u2013 far from it, as we learn \u2013 they went through history and found people who were otherwise about to die, usually in horrible ways, to \u2018save\u2019 them by way of making them guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The narrator\u2019s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was aboard the HMS Terror<\/em> during the doomed Franklin Expedition in the Arctic waters north of and around what is now Nunavut, where the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia led to the death by exposure and starvation of over 100 men, along with no survivors. The Ministry extracted Gore, knowing he would die shortly anyway (so his removal would not affect the historical timeline), and put him in the narrator\u2019s care, housing them together in a shared apartment once he\u2019s released from several weeks of confinement and forced re-education so he and his fellow time travelers, some of whom came from the 1600s, would know what a car is or how money works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a thriller here within The Ministry of Time<\/em> \u2013 as you might imagine, the British Crown\u2019s intentions here are hardly pure or altruistic \u2013 but the novel is a love story at its core, as the narrator and Graham develop feelings for each other from very early on, despite the gulf between them in times, cultures, and ethnic origins. (Race and racism are frequent fodder for dry humor in the book, especially as the various \u2018expats\u2019 from times past, all of whom are white, struggle to adjust to a multicultural society where a whole bunch of words are no longer suitable for common use.) The relationship comes across as natural, almost inevitable, including the required element where one gets furious at the other and appears to break things off, which here happens simultaneously with the big twist and leads to a slightly ambiguous but extremely satisfying conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bradley also has a knack for creating supporting characters who manage to be three-dimensional and yet still useful in various ways, often for humor but occasionally for purposes of intrigue or suspense. The narrator\u2019s own handler, Quentin, might be a conspiracy theorist, or he might know more than he lets on. Maggie, from the 1600s, turns out to be a saucy wench (channeling my inner Laurence Sterne here), and gets to explore her sexuality in a way that would never have been permitted in her time. Arthur was about to die during World War I, and has a harder time adjusting to the fact that he\u2019s now in a time when his life and liberty won\u2019t be at risk just because he\u2019s gay. And Adela, the Ministry of Time\u2019s Vice Secretary, starts out as a sort of comic relief taskmaster character, but plays an increasingly essential role in the plot as the story develops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n