For October, we read The Ministry of Time, a debut novel by Kaliane Bradley. While most people in our club liked at least some part of the book, the consensus was not unanimous. The book centers on a top-secret project where figures from the past have been rescued from certain death in their own time periods and transported to the future. At the beginning the narrator, a civil servant of Cambodian-English heritage, has the opportunity to interview for a prestigious role in a new and top-secret branch of the government. She decides to take the role and becomes the bridge (a roommate, companion and observer) of Commander Gore, an explorer who historically died on a failed expedition to the Arctic during the Victorian era.
Right off the bat, the narrator waves aside the science of HOW time travel was invented/discovered by the British government for the formation of the Ministry of Time, and that of course annoyed me. I would have loved to see a bit of due diligence invested in the science here. Still Commander Graham Gore was a real person and it seems the author did do her research on him (as well as for the other “expats” described in the novel). I would have happily read a whole story centered on their adjustment to the modern era. Where they grappled with concepts that were totally unfamiliar and where they found joy was a wonderful thought experiment, and is a testament to the creativity of Ms. Bradley. There are so many funny and engaging moments, the wonder and occasional disdain that they found in modern technology and morays was hilarious and insightful.
In this section, a beautiful if hard-to-imagine relationship between the narrator and Commander Gore spawns. It is written with tension and allure, creating a backstory that seems to explain why a man who comes from an era where people who were not of British or at least European descent were clearly not valued, might fall in love with a person of mixed-Ethnicity despite himself. While forced in places, and maybe indicative of feelings of misbelonging from the author herself, it does describe a mutual love affair bordering on obsession. Ms. Bradley’s writing style comes across in this section with some expressive phrases, “humor can slide ideas under the door” and “you can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others.” There are others which feel a bit over-the-top, but I love poetry, so I found her phrases often lingered in my head.
I struggled with the end of the novel because the science and the story did not progress logically to me. I did not like the inconsistency in tone from start to finish (one so charming, one so jarring and painful). I did not feel it was true to human nature that a love affair would end the way it did (if one truly felt so strongly, then hate and not indifference would be more logical). Mostly though I did not find the science tolerable (even the narrator’s own ark violates the notion of a time paradox).
It was like a dystopian novel was jammed in at the end of what generally felt like a historical romance. I can step back and say “the author decided to engage in a thought experiment about bringing a British commander forward from the Victorian era, and what the future would have looked like if that form of British “exceptionalism” had been allowed to carry forward through the 21st century–the inevitable impact to other nations.” But of course that isn’t what happened, and while the world is certainly not fair and equal among nations, the notion that one country could exist simply for the exploit of another would be shunned world wide in our era.
Again, I don’t want to seem naive that we live in a time of equality, and every piece of fiction is a thought experiment one either resonates with or does not. We do see resource exploitation more heavily in industrialized nations, but also increased consciousness and a desire to reduce consumption. Like many debut novels it felt like her own personal struggles around being of mixed heritage where others couldn’t fully see her, and maybe her guilt over being someone who could “blend in” making her more compliant than others to inequality in systems was where she was trying to go with the book. These were all potentially powerful reflections that could have been written in without the non-scientific sci-fi thriller portion, but I felt that the way she took characters who were so vibrant in the beginning of the novel and reduced them to caricatures by the end to make her point made the novel much less compelling.
All in all I was glad I read it, but it felt like it was two novels mashed together, and the first one was far more creative.