The Ministry of Time

One of my favorite things to wonder is what a random person from the distant past would think of today’s world. If plucked from their time and dropped into ours, what would they think of electricity, internet, modern medicine? What about smaller stuff, like the way we talk, current fashion, and, depending on when exactly they’re from, how long everyone lives? It’s a fascinating thing to think about. And now I have a new thing to wonder: What on earth gave Kaliane Bradley the right to take this concept and break my heart with it!?

The Ministry of Time is a great example of a book whos author knows exactly what they’re doing. Kaliane Bradley has researched the time periods of her characters so well that they feel completely real and alive (and in the case of Graham Gore, he actually was alive in the 1800s as a member of the Royal Navy and an explorer, though very little is known about his life other than that). They jump off the page and say “Look at me! I’m from the past and I’m amazed by your world!” This is especially the case with Margaret, a woman from the 1600s, which we all know is a time when women weren’t treated very well. Margaret absolutely thrives in the 21st century, taking great interest in feminism, crop tops, and the freedom she never saw or even dreamed of in her life before time travel. I loved reading about her adventures and how she took to modern life with such gusto.

The romance between the MC and Graham is an extremely slow burn and I enjoyed every minute of it. Between the MC’s ‘modern-day woman’ views and Graham’s ‘man from the 1800s’ behaviors, they had some incredible, laugh out loud banter. Their relationship is complicated, but sweet, and I love that their romance isn’t the main focus. As the daughter of a woman from Cambodia, our MC is half british, half Cambodian, and she experiences thinly-veiled racism and xenophobia on a regular basis. As she shares her experiences, there are parallels between her story and that of Graham’s who, as an ‘expat’ (as they call the time-travelers), is something of a migrant himself, though he has come from the past rather than another country, which I found very interesting.

Although there was a part towards the end of the book that felt a little cliché, I am overall very happy with The Ministry of Time and I loved the ending. I’d easily recommend this one to anyone who loves speculative fiction, slow burn romance, or the concept of bringing people forth from the past to see what the heck they’d think of the future.

A civil servant in the near future is tasked with care of a time-traveler, a naval officer from 1847, Graham Gore. She is to observe him and help him cope with life in the present day. The Ministry, for whom she works, is said to be studying several time-travelers from the past to study the effects of time-travel on humans and on the timeline.

Gore and the other time-travelers are delightful in their wit, their charm, and their responses to the changes in their worlds. I enjoyed the humor and the characters very much. If everything didn't quite pull together, logically-speaking and scientifically-speaking, my response is, Oh well, and Who cares? Too much fun to miss this little gem.

I rate this as 4 stars.

I loved this book. I loved it so much that I took pictures of certain pages and highlighted the lines that really resonated with me. Heck, I even found myself chuckling while reading this.

What made me love the book?

As an immigrant, a good number of the things tackled here resonated with me. Despite being quite western in a non-western country, I did still face some challenges when I migrated. I found myself being more cautious and hesitant. But at the same time, I felt I had more freedoms with regards to a good number of things. These were things that made me relate to the Expats in the story and even the narrator herself.

I also found myself relating to the Bridges when they broached the topic of the LGBTQ+ and political correctness with the Expats. It’s similar to how, I guess, many of us grapple with discussing the same topics with our elderly relatives.

So, if I loved this book so much, why didn’t I rate it 5 stars?

Well, this book was great but not perfect. There were some details that I did not believe. And yes, this was a sci-fi book so I really should suspend my disbelief. However, I really didn’t think a government agency will just let you walk out of the building after being part of an incident and destroying a very valuable tech.

I also believe that there were certain things that I think were important that weren’t stressed enough or certain things would have been come off stronger if they were tied more closely together. For example, below were 3 things that could have made a stronger impact if they were tied more closely together:

1. Graham found it hard to believe people did so little to help when WW2 was ramping up. The narrator explained that people did the things they did because they were blindly following what they thought were good orders from those up the chain in commend.

2. The narrator inadvertently changed the future by doing something different. She also broke certain protocols.

3. At the end of the book, one of the points made was that we don’t need a time machine to change the course of history. We only just need to do better or be better people.

If those 3 things were tied more closely together, I think the message (that we should do better and not just follow things blindly) would have been stronger.

Now, I’ve read a few other reviews on this book and would like to go over some of them.

Prose:

I am aware that the prose was not necessarily some people’s cup of tea. But, quite frankly, I loved it. It was what separated this book from the other books I’ve read in quite some time. It was this weird mix of formal and flowery.

Some have pointed out that the author had a penchant for using highfalutin words that could have possibly made it harder for readers to digest it. But so, what if the reader had to look up some words? There’s Google. Use it. I think we could all use to broaden our vocabulary.

On top of that, the flowery words were in character of narrator whose specialty was languages.

Marketed as a romance when it’s not:

Honestly, I don’t know how this book was marketed. So, whether the marketing was deceitful, I can’t really tell. But there was romance in it. But it’s probably not the kind of romance folks expect these days in books given its contemporaries.

The romance here was subtle. It was a growing affection brought on by time and familiarity.

From the way Graham was described, we can tell that he was passably attractive. Not drop dead gorgeous or eye catching. He was okay looking. The most striking thing about him was his personality or, as they put it, his temperament. He was quite charming.

But this one line from page 108, really sold to me how magnetic he was to the narrator:

- He filled the room like a horizon

One review mentioned that the romance was quite one-sided. In a way it was. Given how the book was written we can only see the story from the POV of the narrator. We don’t really get much inkling of how it was from Graham’s side because the narrator also didn’t know. And it made sense that the narrator would not have seen obvious signs of interest from Graham given how he’s a man from the late 1800s who had been taught to not be forward towards women he deemed respectable.

There wasn’t much time travel:

I agree that there wasn’t much time travel. But I didn’t go into this book expecting them to be jumping back and forth in time often like it was ‘Back to the Future’. The closest comparison I can make is that this is a reverse Outlander. Or maybe that movie ‘Kate and Leopold’ with Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. The bulk of the story was about how the expats were adjusting to the modern times.