Time travel has been a mainstay of fiction for a long time. As a controlled process, H.G. Wells introduced it in his groundbreaking novel, The Time Machine, but the notion appeared before, usually as a peculiarity, a manifestation of a fickle universe or the inverted logic of dreams. Rip Van Winkle is one example. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court is another. Both of these works are concerned with the fish-out-water aspect of displacement and this is one of the main strengths of the idea, that someone is taken completely out of their milieu and dropped into a situation so beyond what might be considered “normal” (i.e. traveling to another country, being kidnapped, or getting caught up in a shift of class, etc) that perspective is forced into precincts requiring almost complete reassessments. The physics notwithstanding, it irresistible for purposes of cultural reassessment.
If that sounds a bit dry, let me assure you, handled well it is anything but. The trauma of such displacement is wrenching and revelatory in equal measure.
Variations abound and one of them is the “rescue” of someone from the past to be brought into a stipulated “present” so that the rescuee is the one forced to confront a radical shift in perspective. The people who have pulled this unexpected refugee from his or her time can be seen as relatively unaffected as they observe the struggles of their beneficiary/victim, but in the best of these stories it is precisely those who feel insulated by their own familiar surroundings who undergo some of the most profound consequences.
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time provides a full-court experience of this paradox of positions. In a near-future London, the Ministry has the ability to go back and pluck doomed individuals from their situations and bring them into the Now. Obviously, they take people who are about to die, usually in circumstances that are open to speculation
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In this case, five from different years, who are then assigned minders, called bridges, to see them through an adjustment period. Our viewpoint character is assigned Graham Gore, a commander in the British navy, one of those lost in the tragic Franklin expedition of 1847 that went in search of the Northwest Passage and was trapped in ice. Everyone died.
Except Graham, who is rescued into a future he must now confront and adapt to.
Bradley adroitly navigates all the explanatory details and threads a neat path through the pitfalls of any time travel story—technical and philosophical—and proceeds to give us a satisfying spy thriller-cum-acculturation/cognitive-dissonance story. The spy aspect acquires the twistyness and grit of a John Le Carre novel while the acculturation aspect skirts the edges of Romance without falling into the violet mawkishness that genre seems prone. Gore—who is a real historical figure—steps off the page as a fully-realized human being faced with a challenge of adaptation that is, to put it mildly, daunting.
His bridge responds by eventually falling in love with him, a process here accomplished with an enviable believability.
Along the way we are given levels and layers of the same problem from different grounds, racial and cultural, as well as the growing reality of intelligence agency deceptions, and the logical revelation that the ability to do this thing is not exclusive to this period. Consequences of not quite realizing that future time travelers might be involved lead to tragedies both minor and major and add to the messaging that nothing is ever isolated and that time itself is no barrier to involvement.
The ingredients here could easily result in confusion, but Bradley is very good at dovetailing, pivoting, and combining multiple threads into a coherent narrative that offers multiple “Aha!” moments throughout.
And above all, we come to like her characters. They are vibrant and flawed and human. They all run counter to expectations. Gore is possibly one of the best examples of the self-aware refugee who is not who anyone expected given his origins. But then, so is just about every character in this novel. In one way or another, they are all refugees, brought together to minister to each other. The trick for all of them is to realize their own status within the larger context.
Bradley confronts the in-built conundrums of time travel and does not shy away from apparent paradoxes, although in one or two instances her answers may seem facile. Given that one of the concerns of the novel is displacement, there is nothing facile about her responses. She is concerned here with the human costs.
So one may ask at this point, since The Ministry of Time has not been published as such, is this science fiction? Perhaps the best response, given its qualities, is “does it matter?” If one is going to use the tools of a specific form to advance the artistic concerns of a work, the only question is, how well is it done? My own reaction to the question, “is it SF”, is well, yes, that, too. It is other things as well, none of which are less necessary than the others in what is an engaging read that offers multiple perspectives and asks a host of questions best served by Bradley’s use of available conceits. Too abstruse? Read the novel and decide for yourself.
