The Ministry of Time

For most of this book, I wanted to do nothing else with my day but sit and read it. The really excellent writing is quintessentially British, but the author pulls in some cultural richness from her Cambodian ancestry.

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The story takes actual people from history and places them in modern-day Britain. The author gives them not a backstory but a forstory, you could say.  

The people come from time periods between 1600 and the 1840s, and the way the author adjusted the language for each of them is a delight. The woman coming from the 1600’s speaks an English that, if we heard it today, would make us stop and stare. Every time that character in the book spoke, I LOLd. It’s fantastic.

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‘Look here! ’Tis known as “Sex on the Beach”! The spark behind the taps did take such care over its compaction, I must assume it is a potion to summon its namesake.’

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This is a time travel story that actually makes sense, but what makes this novel great, in my opinion, are the interactions the between characters, the love story itself, not the mechanics of who went when with what.

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The next evening, I went to meet her at the pub she had suggested, an old-fashioned watering hole close to the Ministry, poky and bizarrely fuggy and upholstered in leather. It was like being inside the elbow of a patched jumper.

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The sex scenes are well calibrated and well-done. You can imagine how different the assumptions and mores about intimacy are between contemporary people and people born hundreds of years ago, but the author handles it so well that those passages aren't clumsy or tedious.

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What I love most about this book is the way the author describes things. Her descriptive power is impressive. Here are just a few examples:

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She was a small, tough, wiry woman who put me in mind of an elegant alligator.

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I walked down to the central lobby with Simellia, who’d left the meeting room like a diver kicking free of a kraken.

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She’d looked at me as you might a cat who, with unusual perspicacity, has brought home a ten-pound note instead of a dead mouse.

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He misses Australia. He’d like to feel the amniotic swelter of the continent’s interior.

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And my favorite:

Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font.

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This is a pleasure to read. Even though it is the debut novel of Ms. Bradley, it deserves all the awards it has received. It’s a comedic, dramatic, time-travel love story with thought-provoking ideas, one of which is how a passing comment can change the future.

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