I was very interested in The Ministry of Time because I find the premise not only very interesting but also very similar to a premise I had for a book over fifteen years ago.
In my book, the narrating character (who was deliberately a self-insert character with my personality, interests and living conditions) failed military intelligence interviews (as I did). They are later surprised by being giving a job in a Intelligence department for failures which investigated the ludicrous. One of the things they investigate is a machine an eccentric old man made in his shed before dying. It’s a time machine. However, the rules of time travel mean that a person can’t change anything in any time they travel back to as it’s already happened from the point of departure, nor does anything they do in the future have any effect, as it hasn’t yet happened from point of departure. They can’t even bring technology from the future because it dissolves. In effect, it’s useless.
My character suggests that the machine might be used to bring people from the past. They won’t be able to do much, or remember it when they are put back but they may have interesting perspectives on the present that may prove useful. If anything, it’s a huge resource of intellectual possibility. So my character fetches Samuel Johnson and lives with him as he processes the modern world. He becomes a couch potato, loving Eastenders because it revels in the fact that “life is more to be endured than enjoyed” and he’s a fan of Top Gear.
I had a great ending for the book. Another shady group of people were kidnapping beautiful women from history to act as courtesans but when they kidnap Helen of Troy, the Archaeans turn up and fight the metropolitan police. Also, King Arthur is back, and all the lost heroes of England, and a UFO hangs over London. It’s Samuel Johnson who puts it together, that the machine isn’t a time machine, it’s a machine that makes real (instantiates, you could say) elements of collective consciousness, and in the case of Samuel Johnson himself, the ideas my character has of him. To save the world from falling into chaos, Johnson realises the machine needs to be switched off, but to do that would kill him, something he is dreadfully scared off, so it’s a tremendous sacrifice when he does it and there’s not a dry eye left in the house.
I never finished writing this novel though, because although I had a beginning and an end, I had no middle beyond the self-insert character and the historical one to mooch about London and have high-jinks and fish-out-of-water gags. I think Kaliane Bradley had a similar problem.
She tries to solve this a number of ways. The first is that she has a group of historical characters and that a number of them become friends. This means that they are not only out of time now, but are out of time with each other and yet this friendship group is the most charming thing in the book. I loved how they’d have pot luck dinners together, go on picnics, go to nightclubs and compare notes on the twenty-first century.
I really liked Margaret, a housewife from 1665, who found great liberation in the modern era which she grabs wholeheartedly. I loved her fondness for film, her sartorial and sexual experimentation and the glee which she takes to I new life. I also loved Arthur’s kindness, quietness and slow opening up. He was the sweetest character. Then there was the main historical character, Graham Gore, who is omnicompetent, charming but clearly quite ruthless and pragmatic underneath. (I found it interesting that this books started after Bradley watched the series The Terror, if just because it seemed so recent to me to have written and published a story inspired by it.)
Bradley also tries to solve the problem of the middle by adding a love story. It comes a little late, seems a little sudden and is pretty explicit in a way that seems out of place with the rest of the book but less out of place if thought of as part of a possible The Terror fandom. Of course, I couldn’t have a romantic relationship with Samuel Johnson, we just don’t tickle each other’s funny bones in that way.
There’s a very sudden spy/timey-wimey turn to the last quarter of the book, full of attention grabbing but unlikely twists and turns, which suggests that Bradley didn’t have much of an ending planned to the book either. Even though clues are seeded earlier, they feel like inserts in a later draft as they are so tonally different to the first half of the book.
The Ministry of Time is best when it opts for descriptions of the historical characters acclimatising to the modern world. It’s fun to imagine how you’d explain the internet, or cinema, or to take someone from the past to a bottomless brunch. How would people from other time periods enjoy our music and culture? How would they feel about the sheer overload of information? How would you explain the horrors of the twentieth century? I really liked Graham’s reactions to climate change, to the bursts of heatwave or tropical storms hitting London - that’s a real and creeping horror that doesn’t appear in many contemporary novels.
I didn’t like the narrator though. I didn’t think her backstory of generational trauma from her mother’s experiences in Cambodia added much to the story. Apart from anything, her trauma, though real is one generation removed, whilst all the historical characters had experienced the trauma up close. Perhaps it’s my own lack of nuance, but I was hazy about all the stuff about how the narrator may have imbibed the colonial mentality, except to suggest that it would lead her future self into a kind of ruthless fascism. Was that what I was supposed to get from that? Also, her job was to monitor her figure from time, and she was terrible at that. There’s also the fact that she wonders why the technicians on the project hate Bridges like her, before than stating she gets paid more them then and rudely ignoring one - was that supposed to be irony?
The writing does try a little too hard to be surprising and overuses metaphor and simile, especially self-consciously ‘new’ metaphor and simile - I hope never to understand what “a noise like a slapped canary is.”
Ultimately, this was a book a enjoyed to a reasonable extent. I think I probably would have liked it more had it simply been a slow-burn romance between a modern woman and a man from the past with a happy ending.
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