As the energetic debut novel “The Ministry of Time” opens, our narrator, a British-Cambodian civil servant based in future London, is interviewing for what might be the job of a lifetime (she’ll be tripling her salary, for one thing). Building on her current role as a translator-consultant at the Ministry of Defence, she has already passed the required first-aid, Safeguarding Vulnerable People, and the Home Office’s Life in the UK examinations, and vaguely thinks that the new position has something to do with refugees “of high-interest status and particular needs.”
Boy, does that turn out to be an understatement. Her interview with the terrifying Adela — who sports an eye-patch and introduces herself as the Vice-Secretary of Expatriation — goes smoothly, even as it reaches the more revelatory angle of the meeting. Our narrator, who will be known as a “bridge,” will indeed be working with expats, helping them settle into their new lives in the UK over the course of a year.
“‘And they are expats from…?’” asks the soon-to-be bridge.
“‘History.’
‘Sorry?’
Adela shrugged. ‘We have time travel,’ she said, like someone describing a coffee machine. ‘Welcome to the Ministry.’”
As our narrator explains: “All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.” But they certainly are experimenting now: The book’s narrator is one of five “bridges” working with expats from history, a handful of individuals carefully selected from various wars, plagues, and disasters who would have perished in their own timelines, the gist of that strategy being: “Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future.” Another aspect of the experiment is focused on exploring what impact time travel might have on people, since “[n]o one had any idea what travelling through time might do to the human body.”
So far, so mind-spinningly reasonable, though sinister red flags are definitely waving: Two of the original group of seven expats had already perished following the “extraction process.”
Our narrator has her hands full as a bridge to Graham Gore, a Royal Navy officer who had been part of the Franklin expedition to the Arctic, extracted from the year 1847. His colleagues include Margaret Kremble, a woman taken from a plague house in 1665; Thomas Cardingham, a Battle of Naseby lieutenant from 1645; an army captain, Arthur Reginald-Smyth, engaged in 1916′s Battle of the Somme; and Anne Spencer, a woman from 1793 Paris.
The fish-out-of-water syndrome, as you might imagine, hovers irrevocably over the tale. “He came to me knowing the basics about the electric grid, the internal combustion engine and the plumbing system,” notes our narrator — our own personal “bridge,” really — of Graham. “He didn’t know about the First and Second World Wars or the Cold Wars, the sexual liberation of the 1960s, or the war on terror. They had started by telling him about the dismantling of the British Empire, and it hadn’t gone down well.”
But Graham has a robust set of assimilation abilities up his sleeve, propelled both by a luscious sense of humor as well as all the signs of an early adopter. When our narrator decides to teach him how to ride a bike, Graham promptly gets a motorcycle: “‘Did Bellerophon, on seeing Pegasus, say, “Oh, no thank you, terrestrial horses will be sufficient?”’” (His initial introduction to the concept of germs is also quite entertaining.) Learning about washing machines, radios, and vacuum cleaners, he teasingly questions the non-availability of thousand-league boots, invisibility cloaks, and “[s]un-resistant wings of Icarus”: “‘You have enslaved the power of lightning’” he says. “‘And you’ve used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help.’”
And when our narrator, in a misguided bid to be girly, comes home with a bag in the shape of a chicken, Graham responds, “‘I see that even in the future, women remain fascinated by impractical accessories.’”
The spirited development of a more-than-affectionate relationship between our bridge and her naval officer quickly takes on its own life, amid a twisty plotline that incorporates plenty of John le Carré and Mick Herron spy-craft references — safehouses galore, nefarious assassinations, super-secret government activities — with the silly, incisive, and spot-on comedy of Douglas Adams. The scenes where our narrator, Graham, Margaret — who has taken to films and clubbing like a duck to water — and Arthur hang out in each other’s homes or down the pub are a particular pleasure: relaxed, funny, and full of quotidian doings like cooking, drinking cocktails, sharing stories, and laughing.
Then a few things appear to go dreadfully wrong: Anne Spencer stops registering on official scanners; our narrator, during one of her check-ins with Adela, notices bridge reports, unread, in the trash; and even more mendacious elements rear their ugly heads when our bridge takes Graham to a local pub to meet some of her non-Ministry friends. It’s a sudden reminder that “[c]ross-historical immigration is still immigration,” and not everyone might think it’s the best of ideas.
Bradley’s intelligent and fun-infused touch generates a perceptive tale of misfits who create a cohesive and supportive community together, a tale of authentic solidarity that also makes plentiful room for a timely reminder that “the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history.” Even in a novel of the future.
THE MINISTRY OF TIME
By Kaliane Bradley
Avid Reader, 352 pp., $28.99
Daneet Steffens is a journalist and critic. You can find her @daneetsteffens.