Kat's Reviews > The Ministry of Time

it’s only March, but I can confidently say literally no matter what else I’ll be reading this year, this book will firmly sit at the #1 spot of “what the f did I just read” by the end of 2024. 🫡

Simply put, The Ministry of Time (which has NOTHING to do with the Spanish series of the same name and sure as hell didn't plagiarise anything) is a novel set in not so distant future Britain about a compliant civil servant who out of the blue is told that her country has acquired the means to travel through time and who finds herself promptly recruited as a time travel agent who, alongside others, is tasked to live with, assist, and monitor a group of ‘expats’ stolen from across time, shepherding them into the 21st century, all in order to test the limits of time travel.

But I also need want to tell you that one of goodreads’ top liked reviews on this book calling it “the closest thing to OUTLANDER since [they] have read since OUTLANDER” doesn’t even come close to describing what this novel also is:

a self-insert, first person POV fanfiction, not about a fictional character, but about a man who really existed, who even has his own Wikipedia page (read that again), leading to a narrative set-up so incredulous and bizarre, if the author had told me she and her friends came up with this idea during a pub crawl that, after consuming several alcohol containing beverages, led to a wild round of the Wiki Game until one of them stumbled upon Graham Gore’s entry only to read that he was an English naval officer who supposedly died during an Arctic expedition in the 1850s, I would have believed her, no questions asked. 🤠

before you continue reading I need you to be very real about this and take a look at the man in question:

I can't and won't elaborate. 🙂‍↔️🙂‍↔️

But maybe I just need to chill out because doesn’t every idea for a story start with a bit of self-indulgent self-insert? Dante did it, Stephanie Meyer did it, surely Kaliane Bradley can do it, too. The latter, however, included a real person turning him into her version of a fictional character. This, too, has been done before (recent examples include The Christie Affair as well as Hamnet), and I’m not looking to jump into an ethics discussion I am wholly unequipped for, but it was bizarre reading about the main character being gone down on (can I even say this??) by a navy officer (who in real life was definitely a racist and misogynistic Imperialist) in first-person narrative. And the sex was actually well-written in a way that was super realistic for a man and a woman born two centuries apart having sex for the first time. 🫣

He bit me sharply on the shoulder and some other animal noise escaped me. He started to dig his thumbs into tender places while he moved in me. I bucked insistently into the pressure. A certain thrilling pain, which lived in my body like another body, woke and opened its long series of tributaries through my ribs.

Another reason why this is not only far from Outlander, but also far from what fans of Outlander might hope to find in here, is that yes, there is a romance story but this novel isn’t ABOUT romance, something that clearly shows in the writing style and the story’s focal point (more on that later). Bradley’s writing is expressive, creative, smashing nouns and adjectives together into similes and metaphors that should make no sense but weirdly do.

We entered the season of rains. A great graphite pencil inscribed the diagonal journey of water on the air.

March came in, mellow and pastel. The air felt washed. The scrubbed newness of the spring gave the rooftops and the street furniture a friendly polish.

The novel is part sci-fi, speculative fiction, action adventure, spy thriller, and romantic comedy and the writing reflects all of these genres more successfully than not, mostly because it changes style more often than not. Sweeping metaphors follow internal monologues, stand-up style commentary is superseded by onomatopoetic neologisms used to convey coughing, sneezing, throwing up, and sounds of pleasure. It’s hard for me to describe but there is something raw and yet precisely wielded about her words that makes me wonder what her literary voice sounds like when it focuses on just one of the themes touched upon in this novel instead of a myriad of them in which it is drowned out by all the things squeezed into it.

It is shared very early on that the British-Cambodian main character has been subjected to racial microaggressions all her life, something she picks up, talks about, and dissects throughout the course of the novel, reflecting her life as a biracial woman working for the government of a former colonial empire in a sometimes bitter, sometimes satirical, sometimes seemingly blassé voice. Those moments of critique that tear down past and current day Britain with its violent racist history as well as its linguistic gymnastics whenever Blackness or racial diversity comes up are the sharpest, the most poignant - Bradley’s language becoming a razor-sharp spear tip piercing the bullsh!t masquerading as equal opportunities for everyone.

Many other topics including manmade climate change, refugees, immigration, violence against women, homophobia, otherness, parent-child relationships, complicity, crimes against humanity etc are also mentioned, but none the above are explored as deeply as I would have liked. Maybe it’s because the novel tried to be or do too many things at once but there wasn’t enough of the stuff I DID enjoy for me to fall in love with this.

Since the BBC snapped up the adaptation rights to this even before the novel has come out, we will not have seen the last of Officer Graham Gore (and this will not even be the first time he is portrayed on screen since he already appeared in AMCs The Terror). Given that A24 is set to produce this six-episode series I admit I’m a little excited for how this aggressively weird, headstrong, unique, absurd novel ends up looking as a serialised adaptation.

Last but not least, write that self-insert fanfiction, speak your truth! ✨👸🏽

🎬 After reading this you should watch that: Kate and Leopold (2001), Lost in Austen (2008), About Time (2013)

As always, thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for granting me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.