Review: The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book, unfortunately, falls into the category of "literary author who thinks they can write science fiction." While that can certainly be done--Cormac McCarthy's The Road comes to mind--in most cases the result is a mediocre combination of the two genres. It usually goes like this: from a technical craft point of view, the book may be beautifully written, with sentences and paragraphs that sing--but when you cross over to the SF side of the story, the notes fall woefully flat.

Just as an example, here is a paragraph picked at random.

The day I'd chosen was, in fact, fair. The light was even and soft, like carefully sifted flour. Deranged by the heat shift, unseasonal roses were bursting and shedding luminously in front gardens and public squares. A cool breeze ran alongside us as we cycled; it resembled nothing so much as a handshake. As with every time I experienced clement weather, I was overcome with the sense that my troubles and pains had been put on hold, and would resume after an interval break in which I could, spiritually speaking, use the bathroom and get a drink and generally fix myself.

This style of writing is fine in and of itself, I suppose, but when stuff like this is sprinked into every page of the book, it feels more and more like the author saying, "LOOK AT ME! SEE HOW CLEVER AND WRITERLY I AM!" Frankly, towards the end of the book these literary flourishes began to get irritating. I wanted the author to GET ON WITH THE STORY instead of slinging these fluffy metaphors and tangled similes everywhere.

Needless to say, that means this book's pacing is thoroughly messed up. The first half of the book proceeds at a tortured crawl, and the second half at a gasping, lung-heaving run. This brings the book's second problem into sharp focus: the fact for a purported "science fiction"novel,the "science"part of it is sorely lacking. This is a time-travel romance where the time-travel mechanism is handwaved at best (the titular Ministry of Time actually steals it, from visitors a century further down the line who are trying to alter their future of accelerated climate change). In fairness, it's obvious the author is not at all interested in how her "blue door" might work. (It works, all right, but if someone is standing in its way when it manifests, that person is slashed to ribbons.) She is concerned with the five people from past centuries who have been brought forward in time, how they are coping--or not--with the strange new world they have unwillingly been dumped into, and the culture clash between them and their minders.

Our protagonist and narrator is one of those minders, or "bridges," a nameless British-Cambodian woman who becomes involved, both professionally and personally, with one Graham Gore, who was yanked from a doomed Arctic expedition in 1847. (And may I say that the author's refusal to reveal her name is damned annoying.) The plot twist to all this (which most people will see coming, and which frankly is a bit cliched and tiresome) is that her boss, one Adela Gore, is the protagonist from another timeline twenty years down the road, who married Graham and had a child by him. This plot twist was unpersuasive, I thought, and rather pointless by the end.

At the very end, we find out the narrator has been writing this entire story to her future self, attempting to get Adela to make different choices (and thus change the timeline, I suppose). The last three paragraphs of the book are actually the best-written of the entire thing, a simple, elegaic plea for "forgiveness and hope." I wish the rest of the book had been written in the style of those final paragraphs. As it is, it's just not something I cared for.

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