The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: book review
Overview: Our unnamed main character takes a promotion in her government position into a secret project at a new government branch called the Ministry. Her job is to help transition a man they yanked from the past into the twenty-first century. While she comes to love her job and the man she's been put in charge of, her job isn't as simple as it seems on the surface. As her year of being a "bridge" progresses, the truth behind the project progressively unravels to reveal a reality far darker. Overall: 4
Characters: 4 The characters are what make the book. Even though the time travel and sci-fi premise is obviously a large part of this book, it equally feels like literary fiction. Three quarters of the book is devoted to really diving into the "expats" transition to learning about the modern world and the relationships that are formed between the expats and the bridges. And it is a fantastic character study where everyone is well fleshed out and deeply compelling. A lot of this character work revolves around drawing parallels across large spaces. The main character's mom moved to the UK from Cambodia, and the immigrant narrative is woven into the fabric of her life experience. She often likens her own experiences to that of what the expats are experiencing as they have to learn to interpret the space-time gap, and this brings out some very thoughtful commentary.
Plot: 4 This novel is very literary with a high concept. In that sense, most of the plot is in service of revealing new things about the characters. The pace is great, but it's not plot-heavy in the way that you typically conceive of genre novels being until the final quarter. I wish that it had kept up its own unique bend on the storytelling, but I also understand the author's sense that there did need to be a big, splashy climax and a true-to-form final battle. I just didn't find this last section super compelling, and it wasn't as meticulously thought out as the earlier parts of the book. There were far more holes and missing puzzle pieces that I noticed that were supposed to be blanketed over by the amount of action. It did lose some of the emotional resonance that had been carefully built.
Writing: 4 I am so impressed by Bradley's voice. It hooked me from the very first page and convinced me to read a book that was genre-wise a bit out of my comfort zone. Each character has such a distinct voice. The interiority is spot-on, and our main character is compelling as well. This book was simply fun on a sentence level. I just enjoyed the act of reading it, larger story notwithstanding. Good writing alone doesn't sustain an entire novel, but it can absolutely elevate a solid idea into a new stratosphere. If you typically just read contemporary literary fiction like I do, this was a fun way of branching out without moving too far past my typical comfort zone, so I'd highly recommend giving The Ministry of Time a try.
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