The Ministry of Time is structured as a confessional narrative from the perspective of a rather ordinary British civil servant entrusted with an extraordinary responsibility. The U.K. has been cautiously experimenting with time travel, and they’ve brought five people from the past to present-day London, hoping to observe the toll that time travel and living in an unfamiliar era take on their bodies. Our unnamed narrator, a half-English, half-Cambodian second-generation immigrant, has been deemed a good fit to serve as a bridge for one of the time travelers, or “expats” as the Ministry terms them, because she can presumably relate to feeling displaced and “othered.”
She is paired with Graham Gore, a naval man from the early-Victorian era who was doomed to die on an Arctic expedition before the Ministry pulled him out of his own timestream. Graham is taciturn and repressed, suspicious of technology and horrified by what has happened to the London he knew. Our narrator winces at his outdated language and offensive belief system, but he is generally receptive to correction and unfailingly polite. As she becomes closer to Graham, she also becomes more convinced that everything is not as it seems at the Ministry. Co-workers disappear without notice, and directives and procedures are constantly changing. The mission is decidedly unclear, and our narrator feels she is constantly falling short of the expectations set for her.
There’s a lot going on here. The Ministry of Time could be described as a time-travel romance thriller, except for the fact that it isn’t really very good at any of the three. Bradley isn’t really interested in developing the nature and effects of time travel, essentially just cribbing the basics from better examples of the genre. The one exception is a fairly nifty idea that the present can reject the expats the same way that a body might reject a transplanted organ. This intriguing idea is brought up and referred to a couple of times, but without much in the way of a payoff. The romance aspect is a little more promising, in that Bradley does well in establishing the chemistry between Graham and his handler, but it’s a relatively brief portion of the overall story. The thriller aspect is given especially short shrift, and the novel’s few episodes of hand-to-hand combat and gunplay are unremarkable.
Bradley is much more interested in identity. The author herself is British-Cambodian, just like her narrator, and the narrator’s uneasy feelings about her status as Brit, her ability to pass as white, and the advisability of openly discussing her ethnic background are the most well-developed part of the novel. However, this aspect comes to dominate in ways that don’t really serve the story. A scene involving two characters in a standoff at gunpoint devolves into a discussion of intersectionality more suited to a freshman college course.
With a strong premise and the best intentions, The Ministry of Time had a lot of potential, but the lack of specificity and focus doomed it to be a forgettable mess.