"Ministry of Time:" a tepid blast from the past
And I guess it was. In a near-future Britain, a pretty young civil servant joins the title agency to help repatriate people scooped from the various eras in the past. Somehow the government has stumbled on a way to do this, and now wishes to test the effects on both the “expats” and that pesky space-time continuum (which you’ll recall from the “Back to the Future” movies).
Since each of the abductees is presumed to have died in their own era, the bureaucrats think there’s little risk to the timeline. Maybe a bit more to the expats themselves. A few develop subtle symptoms, such as becoming slowly invisible to CCTV cameras and biometric sensors. It’s as though something in the timeline is trying to erase the anomaly they represent.
The ministry assigns each expat a “bridge” to help them assimilate into modern British society. Not surprisingly, our attractive protagonist is assigned to the equally attractive Lt. Graham Gore, lately of the doomed Franklin expedition of 1847. And of course it’s just a matter of time (sorry) for occasional bits of bodice-ripping prose to creep into the narrative. Sex happens.
That’s enough about the premise. I’m sort of familiar with the history, more familiar with the conventions of time-travel fiction. On the other hand, I’ve never read a romance novel I liked, and with “Ministry of Time” my streak remains unbroken.
Time-travel yarns are always undone by the inevitable paradox: if you change the past, then the version of you that wanted to change that past can’t exist. When you go back in time to kill Hitler, you also kill the reason to get rid of him in the first place.
Better writers have offered all sorts of novel ways around this conundrum. Kaliane Bradley mostly just ignores it. SPOILER HERE: Timelines intersect willy-nilly, and the characters are somehow cognizant of every permutation. Some actually converse with other versions of themselves, which is sort of a middle finger to those sci-fi savants who at least tried to make it all make sense. While the story coheres for the first two thirds, it begins to fall apart toward the end.
My wife read “Ministry” at the same time, and at the end asked me to explain what happened.
My reply: “If I could make it make sense, I would have liked the book a lot more.”
So: Three stars on Goodreads. Not a terrible time-travel tale, and briefly interesting bits of history. Works as a romance too, I suppose, if that’s your groove. But it’s a book I’m glad I borrowed rather than bought.
Comments
My most recent book was a re-read of "Devil in a Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley. The ending still seems weak, but I remain impressed by how good it is in general, especially for a first novel. The Easy Rawlins books (especially the early ones) are a worthy successor to Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, in my opinion.