Bree T's Reviews > The Ministry of Time

Feels like this book is everywhere at the moment. It was even on Barack Obama’s summer reading list. I had already requested it from my local library when I saw that, having seen it plenty of other places and I had to read it right away as I knew I wouldn’t be able to renew it.

In the ‘not too distant future’, Britain has mastered the art of time travel. They’ve gone back to various points in time and brought in people from those time periods to the 21st century. People who were as good as dead anyway, who in being removed from their own timeline into this one, won’t alter the course of the future in any way. Each time traveller is assigned a ‘bridge’ from within the British civil service, someone to help them adjust to their new lives.

Ok I just tried to write the name of the MC and was like….what was it? I have no idea. I don’t think she’s ever named? If she is, I’ve honestly forgotten it. She is ‘given’ as her subject to help assimilate, Commander Graham Gore, a man who in 1847 was on a doomed expedition to the Arctic when he was yoinked into the 21st Century. This is a man who was born and lived during the height of the British Empire. He now finds himself living alone with a woman (and a woman who is British Cambodian at that, although ‘white passing’) in a world that has flushing toilets, Spotify, movies, multiculturalism, etc. The Empire is not what Commander Gore would remember at all and he’ll have to be educated on the various battles and events that shaped the world to make it what it is today.

As our narrator and Commander Gore settle into his new existence, things between them become complicated. Not all of the subjects are coping well with their new environments, there’s definitely some suspicious activity going on at the office in charge of this ‘program’ and there’s also another mystery, not to mention the struggle for control over the technology that has allowed this program to go ahead.

I loved the idea of this so much! Such a fascinating story. Because Commander Gore was part of an expedition to the Arctic, we get snippets of that. He is apparently, a real person who did die on this real expedition and I enjoyed the portrayal of a man from 1847 learning to negotiate life in an entirely different London than he would remember. Everything is new to him, including the very fabric of modern day society. There are definitely some….delicate matters to negotiate, such as words we don’t say anymore, views it’s no longer palatable to hold (or at least, to speak out loud). Despite this abrupt removal from all he knew, Commander Gore is relatively well adjusted, even though he does have his struggles of course. But honestly, he copes about as well as expected for a man of his station from his time transplanted into a society much like the one we live in today. He has all number of things to get used to, not just learning 300 years worth of history, but also learning to negotiate general every day things that we would take for granted. Others do not cope as well.

I really liked the way things developed between Gore and our narrator, for the most part. They are living in this very unique situation, where he basically relies on her for all this information and help and guidance and she is responsible for making sure that he basically doesn’t freak out. Everything is obviously of the utmost secret and they are frequently called for meetings and assessments and she has to write reports (which she feels no one ever reads). The more you get into the story the more there are other things at play, little mysteries and discrepancies, things that don��t add up or seem… weird. Well, weird even for a situation involving time travel. There’s a character in particular that is very interesting and it was fun trying to put together where that was going.

There’s a load of really interesting talk in here about colonialism and slavery and being a ‘displaced person’ (the main character’s mother is a Cambodian refugee). However – I honestly feel like the book lost its way towards the end. A lot was happening, a lot of things were frantically attempted to tie up all the threads, some new stuff was even introduced, there was a complication in the developing romance and honestly, for me, it all began to feel a bit rushed, a bit lacking in finesse. A bit unfinished, even. Although for me, that was the ending, which I found really quite irritating.

This would make a fun movie or TV show, where you could really showcase the “fish out of water” aspect of the characters brought from their own timelines into this one, as well as amp up the drama and the threat as our narrator realises that there’s stuff going on that is putting them in danger. As a book, it was interesting but….the ending just needed work for me. It wasn’t as smooth as the rest of the story.

All in all a good read but not sure that for me, it attained the heights the hype set for it.

3.5 🌟