(courtesy Hachette Australia)
There is a point, when you have read many novels, where you begin if there is truth to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun.
It’s not that what you’re reading isn’t clever, heartfelt or imaginative; they often are and they make reading the true joy is but there comes a point where you feel like many of the stories are simply riffs, no matter how well done, on the same old ideas.
And then along comes an explosively inventive novel like The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley which blows an absolute hole through any and all your expectations of what a long-form story can be, offering up a thrillingly intelligent premise, characters who consume you with their visceral humanity and ideas so well thought through and vividly presented that head and heart march in perfect and affecting unison.
It’s been hyped as one of the novels of the year with its author Kaliane Bradley cited by the Guardian newspaper as one of its “10 best new novelists for 2024” and the book’s Australian publisher which points to an array of publications including the Sunday Times and BBC, who have labelled it in various ways “a literary sensation”, and honestly, this is one of those few times where all the effervescent excitement is absolutely worth the price of tremulous admission.
‘This is London?’ he asked, finally.
‘Yes’.
‘How many people live here now?’
‘Nearly nine million.’
He sat back and shut his eyes.
‘That’s far too large a number to be real,’ he murmured. ‘I am going to forget that you told me.’
One key reason why The Ministry of Time well and truly lives up the hype is that it takes an audacious promise, one that dwells well and truly in the realm of the enthrallingly fantastical, and executes in way that are intimately, affectingly, groundedly human.
No matter how out-there the ideas, and they are gloriously good in just how out-there they are, Bradley never once loses sight of the fact that these are real people with vastly differing life experiences – why that is will be explained in a moment – coping with the sort of situations that defy anybody’s ordinary expectations of what they’ll encounter in life.
And as situations the one that pivots under and drives the narrative of The Ministry of Time with thoughtfully fierce energy is a doozy.
In the near-future, British have got their hands on time travel technology and as part of working out how this gifthorse of temporal wonders can be used to their strategic advantage, they bring back five people from the past and embed in domestic living arrangement with “bridges”, highly-paid agents whose job it is to bring people from disprate centuries into the 21st century.
When you’re talking someone from plague-ridden 17th century London or a solider on the frontlines of WW1 in 2016, or and this one really matters because he was half of a magnificent protagonist double, an Arctic expedition Commander from 1847, that’s a lot of intense acculturation that has to take place in the mother of all hothouse environments.
In this brave new temporal experiment, which is top secret and prosecuted with unrelenting scientific rigour and an unfailing eye on strategic benefits, often to the exclusion of the best interests of the five chrono guinea pigs concerned (though that’s never said out loud; it’s all easily observable subtext if you where to look in the governmental and bureaucratic landscape of near future Britain), two people end up at its centre for better or worse.
The first is, of course, the aforementioned military man, Commander Graham Core, a man who perished, in our reality at least, along with the rest of the doomed members of Sir John Franklin’s late-1840s expedition to the Arctic.
But in the timelime of The Ministry of Time, he has been plucked from the ice by a dazzling blue portal and deposited, after initial hospital care and basic induction in life centuries hence from his own, into the care of a British-Cambodian bureaucrat, a woman who is not skilled (is anyone?) is dealing with involuntary temporal refugees but who is assigned the task of getting her “housemate” to the point where he is at home, and this being a government program, of use to the state as quickly as posisble.
It’s a huge ask and a fumble of sorts for both people but as they grow to know each other better, a friendship and then more, forms and as well as being a brilliantly smart and nuanced rumination on the nature of time, truth and power, The Ministry of Time takes on a wonderfully wry and sprightly rom-com tone that sits well with the novel’s more serious and darker aspects.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said. I kissed him. Axioms have us sealing all sorts of things with kisses. Vows. Envelopes. Fates. But parents don’t always tell their children what the slurs and curses mean, for their protection. I thought it would be better, for now, that I didn’t mention the microchip. To tell you the truth I tried not to think about it at all.
Those two elements should necessarily work together well, or at all, but they do and much of the charm of The Ministry of Time is how it balances the seriously intense and the romantically light and fun, the task aided by the way that Bradley invests even the more thrilling aspects of the narrative with raw, honest humanity, both gut-wrenchingly gruelling and lightly fun (explaining some of the quirkier aspects of 21st century life proves to be an amusing challenge and a welcome diversion from discussing world wars and the Holocaust for instance).
The novel also does an exemplarily immersive job of exploring what it is like for everyone in the novel both those from the past and those stuck firmly and always in the present, to deal with pasts, presents and futures.
We all have to do it, and while there’s a big difference between what’s happened to Gore and his “Bridge”, the truth is that they are each in their own lost and uncertain about who they are, who they once were and where they can head, and each one must find a way to make an accommodation with some very ruminatively demanding things indeed.
Dancing between the fantastical and the emotively mundane, and flitting between intense thriller and somewhat fun-filled rom-com territory (though still with a great deal of understandable existential weight), The Ministry of Time is a magnificently good and clever book that takes some incredibly BIG ideas and doing intimately small things with them, asking as it does so whether we can defy history and what effect it has on people to have it all rammed into one intense period where expectations are huge, characters are beguiling and hearts are every bit as much on the line as a slew of far more prosaically pressured concerns.