2025/007: The Ministry of Time — Kaliane Bradley

The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. [p. 271]

The near future. The British government has a machine which allows a limited kind of time travel: the Department of Expatriation extracts doomed individuals from their own times -- just before their deaths, so that their removal won't impact history -- and studies them to learn about the side-effects, if any, of time travel. The unnamed British-Cambodian narrator of The Ministry of Time is recruited as a 'bridge', a person to act as companion, supervisor and teacher to one of the ex-pats. She's assigned to Eighteen Forty-Seven -- Commander Graham Gore, formerly of the doomed Franklin polar expedition.

Gore finds the 21st century challenging, but acclimatises fairly well. He and the bridge smoke a lot of cigarettes (and some recently-legalised cannabis), ride bikes, and explore Spotify ('Any music? Any performances, any time, whensoever you wish it?'). They interact with Sixteen Sixty-Five (Maggie, who is an Absolute Delight) and Nineteen Sixteen (Arthur, who starts off thinking he's a prisoner of war, and ... is not exactly wrong). There is bureaucracy; there are spies; there is romance, and comedy, and hand-wavy science, and hints of a grim future. There are short chapters of Gore's last days in the Arctic, in 1847. And there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it a Wilfred Owen cameo.

The Ministry of Time explores colonialism, Empire, refugees and exiles, the nature of history, racism, and loyalty. That it does so with humour, pathos, and some truly hilarious scenes is a triumph. Our unnamed narrator is burdened with her refugee mother's experiences in Cambodia (she'd 'witnessed the sort of horrors that changed the way screams sounded'), with her own place in the mechanism of the British civil service, with her dual role as friend and as observer. She's constantly (and perhaps rightly) critical of her actions and choices, sometimes well before we're shown their consequences: this maintains tension throughout, and even the ending is less definite than one might wish.

I love this novel. It engaged me so much emotionally that the flaws (uneven pacing, some threads left dangling, that ending) don't matter. It is fun as well as inventive, and I'm looking forward to a future reread.

‘What happens if they survive?’ I asked.
‘Then you will have the lovely warm glow of having contributed to a humanitarian project.’
‘And if they die?’
‘Then you will have contributed to a scientific project.' [p. 38]