I heard a lot of mixed reviews for this one before I decided to pick it up and see for myself. Fair warning: this review will also be mixed.
Our never-named narrator receives a position in a secretive branch of the UK government. Her new job is to be a “bridge”. A bridge is a government worker matched with a time traveller from the past. These time travellers have been brought (not by their choice) to the present day and are being closely monitored to see both the physical effects of time travel on them and their adjustment to modern life. The subjects and their bridges live together and will share their lives for the first year.
The narrator’s subject is Graham Gore – an officer who accompanied Franklin on his fateful journey North. In order to minimize the risk of disrupting timelines, the government has plucked subjects out of the past who were about to perish anyway.
You could categorize this novel as science fiction (because of the time travel) but I have a feeling true science fiction aficionados wouldn’t like this very much. There’s a lot of fiction and very little science and the narrator basically wipes away any questions about time travel by saying, “The UK government has time travel now. Don’t ask too many questions.” I’m not a scientifically-minded person and I don’t enjoy when books get bogged down in details like that, so I thought it was actually pretty perfect. (There is some more explanation closer to the end of the book but I don’t want to give it away.)
It’s hard to share my overall impressions of this book. I want to say it was a light read because it was easy to read and it didn’t take me long to finish, but it actually deals with some pretty heavy issues. Our narrator is the daughter of a woman who fled Cambodia as a refugee and she bears the inter-generational trauma of that. Gore find himself hundreds of years away from everyone and everything he has ever known and what is a fresh tragedy to him is an object of historical interest to the rest of the world. The story is funny in parts – one of the subjects would have died from the plague but instead gets to enjoy modern day London as an open lesbian. But there’s also death and murder and some really dark turns at the end. Not to mention that the glimpses of our world’s future that it offers are not at all pretty.
This is the sort of book that when I finished the climactic scenes and read the last pages, I thought, “What just happened?” I can’t help but feel that the storyline would have benefited from some different pacing or a better plotted final third.
Probably what kept me reading was the characters. Our narrator is messy but competent (one of my favourite combos). She has her weaknesses and definitely makes mistakes but she rarely wallows and she is consistently doing things to advance the plot. She’s the agent of change in her own life and I appreciate that. Gore is a perfectly charming and debonair hero. Of course she falls in love with him. (I don’t think that’s a spoiler because it felt pretty obvious it was coming.) Bradley does a great job of taking what we know about the historical figure of Graham Gore and creating a fully realized character. All while keeping in mind that he was a real person who existed and might not appreciate a fictionalization of himself. It’s a complex portrait that works here.
Overall, The Ministry of Time is fascinating, engaging, and a little bit fun. I look forward to seeing what Bradley does next.
Karissa Reads Books 
So, this is the more serious version of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is what we’re saying? Ha. Okay, but now I’m curious about what the effects of time travel are. I would assume the individual starts melting or having a mental disconnect or something.
Is that what that movie is about? I’ve never seen it. One of the interesting side effects the subjects begin to have is that they don’t get picked up on modern technology. Like they don’t show up on camera or open automatic doors.
Bill and Ted have to do a presentation for their history class or they are going to fail high school. They end up with a telephone booth/time machine thanks to George Carlin, and as they travel through time, they keep bringing home famous historical figures to use in their history presentation and graduate from high school.
That’s funny, I didn’t know that was what it was about.
I’m a sci fi reader/fan and I did really like it! There is, I agree, something wrong about the pacing; where it becomes more of an action thriller is also where it becomes less convincing. But I love our slow, alarming realisation that our narrator is capable of collaboration with what seems like a repressive regime, and I love the characters. This felt a little like Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s Prophet to me, in thst it pretty clearly started out as lockdown self-entertainment and ended up as a really absorbing and capably-written novel that its authors also had a lot of fun writing. It’s on the Women’s Prize longlist now!
Yes, the collaboration aspect and the whole question of what will she do for self-protection was one of the most interesting parts. It’s very creative overall but I agree that the action/thriller ending is the least convincing part.
haha I loved your point about the ‘sciency’ stuff sort of being swept under the rug, which is what I liked about it as well! But agree with everyone in that the ending started to get weird, too fast, and I didn’t like it as much as the first two thirds.
As much as I enjoyed it, I was surprised that it made the longlist of the Women’s Prize. This didn’t seem “literary” enough. But I’ll definitely read more from Bradley when it comes.