The Ministry of Time: A novel about ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’

livemint.com:

Kate and Leopold, or for darkness and danger, as in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of books. In an outstanding feat of restraint, Kaliane Bradley’s time-travel romance/spy thriller The Ministry of Time uses this trope extremely sparingly—although very effectively—in a few short scenes that don’t belabour the point and only add layers to her characters.

Her protagonists are an unnamed 21st century translator—like the author, she is Cambodian-British—who is deputed by the government to act as a “bridge" for her time-travelling charge: Commander Graham Gore, a 19th century naval officer and explorer who was to have died at the North Pole during an ill-fated expedition in 1847. The possibilities for comic misunderstandings here are endless, and yet, Bradley explores the cultural, social, political and racial differences between her protagonists with a light hand.

Also read: Science historian Daisy Hildyard shows us where we are headed Despite some darkly funny moments, this is not an LOL kind of romcom but a measured, thoughtful and very sophisticated debut. Bradley deftly avoids the kind of expository info dump that sometimes becomes necessary in a science-fiction novel, the hows and whys and what-about-physics of it all.

The reader is thrown into the plot from the first page: The project that the narrator and Gore are part of is a social and scientific experiment to extract half-a-dozen ordinary human beings from different points in time and bring them to the 21st century to see how far they can acclimatise, both physically and emotionally. That’s where “bridges" like our protagonist/narrator come in—they live with the “expats", as the time travellers are called, for a year, and help them adjust, along with observing