Ron Charles's Reviews > The Ministry of Time

We’ll never know exactly what happened, but the hoary remains are terrifying enough:

In 1845, more than 120 men under the command of Sir John Franklin set out on two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, in search of the Northwest Passage. They reached the Canadian Arctic, but then their vessels got caught in crushing ice for almost two years. Weakened by scurvy, tuberculosis and lead poisoning, the survivors began walking back to the mainland, hundreds of miles away. They froze, starved, raved. Marks on a few scattered bones suggest some resorted to cannibalism. In the blinding white at the end of the world, all were lost.

Until now.

A secret program developed by the British government has managed to extract one of the missing officers, 1st Lt. Graham Gore, and return him to life in the modern age.

Some of what you’ve just read is historical fact, some is archaeological speculation, and a bit is wacky fantasy. I won’t tell you which is which, but I promise all those elements are blended deliciously in Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, “The Ministry of Time.” From a little DNA scraped off the footnotes of polar exploration, she’s re-engineered a courageous, irresistible man who vanished almost 200 years ago.

You’re skeptical; I don’t blame you. So far as we know, time travel is more written about than embarked upon. And too many of those stories get tangled up in causal loops, timeline dilemmas and grandfather paradoxes. In fact, if I could travel back in time, one of the things I’d do, after strangling baby Hitler and buying Apple stock, would be to tell younger me not to waste time reading so many novels about time travel.

But Bradley has got me rethinking that prejudice. Her utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre. Imagine if “The Time Traveler’s Wife” had an affair with “A Gentleman in Moscow.” No wonder the manuscript for “The Ministry of Time” sold in dozens of markets around the world faster than the speed of light. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...