The Ministry of Time
This one is clearly very popular. It is being promoted heavily by Waterstones, and is a Hugo and Clarke finalist. I can see why. But, as sometimes happens, it also irritated me quite a bit. Let me explain why.
One of the things that you need to do as a publisher is catch internal inconsistencies in novels. Writers, bless them, are forever doing weird stuff like killing off a minor character in one chapter, and having them alive again a few chapters later. Or having characters walk eastward into the setting sun. Novels are hard, so it is not surprising that such mistakes happen. Our job, as publishers, is to help the authors catch as many of them as they can before they go to print.
Or perhaps it used to be, because whoever had that job for The Ministry of Time seems to have been dozing at the wheel.
In chapter 5, Margaret, one of the time-travelled ‘ex-pats’, asks, “what is Hollywood?” Yet in chapter 4 she gives a presentation on the work of Charlie Chaplin. (And yes, I know about Niles, but he moved to LA soon after. He was one of the founders of United Artists, for heaven’s sake.)
In chapter 5 Graham Gore asks, “what is Guinness?” Yet in chapter two he and the narrator go to a London pub together.
I find it really hard to believe that the ‘ex-pats’ are given access to the internet and television, and yet they are kept unaware of the Holocaust.
There’s probably more of this stuff, those are just the issues that leapt off the page at me.
I don’t blame Kaliane Bradley for this. Like I said, writing novels is hard. It is the job of the publisher to help catch such things. But, with the increasing emphasis on profit margins, I suspect that mainstream publishers are becoming increasingly lax with regard to quality control, even for a book that is getting such a big publicity push as this one.
What I am less happy with Bradley about is the portrayal of the ‘ex-pats’ – people pulled out of their own time as experiments by the eponymous Ministry. Graham Gore is obviously a very well rounded, and researched, character. The others seem much more like caricatures of their periods. What’s more, I am not sure that, after a year of training to fit in to 21st Century Britain, some of them should be unable to shake a small number of obvious language habits that mark them out as having lived several centuries ago. I’m sorry, I’m an historian, I care about this sort of stuff.
Quibbles apart, this is a fun mystery novel. I spotted some of the twists in advance, but not all of them. The book is also deeply sceptical of the morality of Whitehall and the British political machine. That I very much approve of.
Something else I liked is that, with the story being set only a few years into the future, the weather in London has become terrible and unpredictable thanks to the unfolding climate disaster. More near future SF will have to deal with this.
Finally, because I am currently reading Absolution, it occurred to me that The Ministry of Time probably draws a lot on Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. Both books involve agents of a shadowy, quite powerful and seemingly incompetent government department struggling to deal with something totally out of the ordinary. If you are going to be looking for inspiration, Area X is as good a place as any to start.
Title: The Ministry of Time
By: Kaliane Bradley
Publisher: Sceptre
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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