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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/03/the-ministry-of-time-by-kaliane-bradley-review-a-seriously-fun-sci-fi-romcom>
"For a book to be good – really good, keep it on your shelf for ever good – it
has to be two things:
fun and
a stretch. You have to need to know what
happens next; and you have to feel like a bigger or better version of yourself
at the end. Airport thrillers are almost always fun; much contemporary
autofiction is just a stretch, largely because it’s very hard for a book in
which not much happens to be a page-turner. What a thrill, then, to come to
Kaliane Bradley’s debut,
The Ministry of Time, a novel where things happen,
lots of them, and all of them are exciting to read about and interesting to
think about.
Bradley’s book is also serious, it must be said – or, at least, covers serious
subjects. The British empire, murder, government corruption, the refugee
crisis, climate change, the Cambodian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11 and the
fallibility of the human moral compass all fall squarely within Bradley’s
remit. Fortunately, however, these vast themes are handled deftly and in
deference to character and plot.
Billed as “speculative fiction”, it is perhaps more cheering to think of it as
50% sci-fi thriller, and 50% romcom.
The Ministry of Time is chiefly a love
story between a disaffected civil servant working in a near-future London, and
Commander Graham Gore, first lieutenant of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated
expedition to the Arctic. Gore, last seen grimly walking across the ice in
1847, has been retrieved from the jaws of death by a 21st-century government
hellbent on testing the limits of time travel.
Gore is one of their “expats”: people brought through time and subjected not
just to a barrage of tests but the tumult of the 21st century (traffic lights,
acknowledging the atrocities of the British empire, Instagram). The expats have
some problems with “hereness and thereness”: they don’t register, necessarily,
on an MRI scan or an airport scanner. What is a person? What is time? How can
the answers to these questions further our geopolitical interests?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
