The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley – Book Review +

Oh my oh my oh my.

(I apologize in advance if this is not a particularly coherent or interesting review. I finished reading the book, then wrote this in a hurry and while it was over 35C, which was somewhat in keeping with this novel, set in a London that is often suffering under heat waves.)

I feel like I should make it as clear as I can, that as a writer, I understand how difficult it is to complete a novel. I have yet to get beyond a second draft of a full novel, and as an author, I really respect anyone who can manage it. I respect that Kaliane Bradley put effort here, and I’m glad this book has done so well. Especially if it gets more people interested in the Franklin Expedition. It seems that this novel began as a fun little passion project, and it’s exciting to see when wild niche projects get lucky and not only published but hit best-seller lists. As a writer, I say, well done.

As a reader, however, I am… definitely confused (and disappointed) by my experience with this book.

You see, I almost stopped reading half way through this book. The only reason I didn’t stop is that I knew this was a popular book, it’s certainly speculative, and I was able to (barely) hold on to wanting to see where it would eventually take Graham Gore.

Okay, so what is this book about? The blurb that drew me in suggests it’s a sort of romantic comedy about time-travel, with one of Franklin’s doomed officers “rescued” into the near future by time-travel future machinery magic, (along with some other people from the past) where Gore is then set up with our (annoyingly unnamed) narrator as his housemate and monitor in London, where they will fall in love, and some top-secret experiment stuff will ensue.

But there’s so much else that goes on. There’s stuff about climate change, and immigration and racism, and I guess the use of the word “refugee” is now considered rude?, there are a few parts where the story telling goes sort of “meta,” there are flashbacks (the flashbacks were not the problem) there is late-stage additional complications with time-traveling, there are future wars, there is a sex scene, which I was not expecting, there are a number of places where I was entirely unsure if there was comedy happening or if I was meant to take things seriously, there are definitely serious parts (I think?) there are certain things I found very predictable and other things seemed to come out of nowhere, and I found a number of developments and characterization choices within the story hard to believe to the point where they felt a bit ridiculous, and I’m not thinking of the time-travel as such here. (One of the things I couldn’t figure out, and I apologize to everyone for this, but I couldn’t figure out if we’re meant to take seriously our narrator’s assertion that Graham Gore is a good looking guy.)

I felt like I was occasionally being lectured at, but I remained uncertain as to the lecture’s point, until the very end when it’s spelled out, only to then be… smudged? Ignored again? I don’t know? I think maybe I disagree with some of the basic premise of the lecture?

I struggled to identify with the narrator/main character a bit. There were also some bits and characterization pieces I quite liked, but not enough of them, and parts I wanted to understand what was trying to be expressed and communicated, and thought they were important for me to figure out a point of view within this novel, but I couldn’t figure it out. I am entirely willing to accept that half the problem I had with this story is that it might be that I’m a generation too old and a demographic too pale to grasp and agree with the vibe. Whatever the overall vibe actually is, with this book.

To me it felt like the vibe was really uneven and kept veering around. Maybe I’m very stupid, but I feel like there were an awfully lot of things that were trying to be crammed into a book that’s less than 350 pages long, some things seem like they’re only in the book to satisfy a whim or friend of the author’s (completely unnecessary and irrelevant to anything else mention of Wilfred Owen, I was looking at you, even before I read the author’s note that confirmed my strong suspicion) and there’s also a lot of ambition to say something about the state of the world and it’s past and future and stuff and I am sorry, I just don’t think it all works together. (I am tempted and began to type more examples of the things that I found quite strange to inappropriate, but I don’t want to be picky and mean, or to get into too much trouble.) But I think this book tries to do too much, all at once. It doesn’t work for me.

Maybe it does for other people. It must do. Looking up the author and discovering she’s only five years younger than me makes me suspect there really is something in the theory of divide between xennials and “proper” millenials and their conceptions of the universe.

It also just made me feel old.

I am a time traveler, and so are you. We’re time traveling right now, and this book makes me feel like I have fallen behind and I will never, ever, adjust to our time right now. Now. This now. Okay. Whenever.

And maybe, I don’t want to catch up, either, and maybe that is 100% okay, because I’m not convinced the “now” of the young(er) in this book is getting it any more “right” than I am. We’re all flailing around here, presumably doing our best, at least on our good days.

I was looking forward to a fish-out-of-water, nearly-frozen-Victorian-in-near-future comedy with maybe some drama. What was wrong with writing something straight-forward-ly that? This, sadly, for me, was not that.

P.S. – A novel that gets mentioned within this novel, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household sounds like it could be fun, and I vaguely think I’ve heard about it before, so maybe I’ll try and read it sometime. It’s from the further back past, so maybe it will be more my speed.

P.P.S. – A little while after reading The Ministry of Time, I read Craig Davidson’s The Saturday Night Ghost Club, which had been on my library wish list for some time. The Saturday Night Ghost Club is a Canadian novel straddling the young adult/adult market, a coming of age story set in the Niagara Falls of the 1980s, and follows a boy through a summer in which he makes some new friends and hangs out with his weird uncle. This is the first book I’ve read all within one day for quite some time (the young-adult easier-to-read factor, I’m sure, in part) but it did keep my attention and while there are some parts of it that felt a bit “CanLit Box Tick” to me, there was some pretty entertaining story-telling going on. (The uncle takes our narrator and his friends to spooky places and tells spooky stories, and they are good spooky stories.) As an adult reader, the general outline of the “big twist reveal” became pretty obvious fairly early on, but I would still recommend the story, particularly if you can pick it up from the library.