I finished this last week and couldn’t say immediately if I liked it or not but I have been thinking about it every day since then, and I think that’s really the tell.
I picked this up without knowing anything about it, except that it was probably about time travel? Anyway, I was surprised on page 1 when I discovered that this is apparently about time travel and the Franklin expedition?? I’ve read The Terror and watched the miniseries, and generally feel familiar with and interested in the history of Arctic exploration, this was a delightful and intriguing discovery!
From there the book gets weirder! Our first-person protagonist is assigned to a new role as a “bridge” in a super secret government time travel project. Bridges are to help those who have been ‘rescued’ from death in the past, aka “expats” – they would have died anyway, you know, so if this experiment kills them, well, it’s a moral wash, right? Our protagonist is Gore’s bridge. They cohabit in a Ministry-sponsored house and she helps him adjust to modern life. As you probably can guess, hijinks ensue.
This reads with the devoted energy of fan fic, which, it turns out, it kind of was! Our narrator uses her job as a bridge, which develops into something weirder and darker, and her growing intimacy with Gore to examine the problems of modernity: identity, colonialism, post-colonialism, climate change, Britishness, Cambodian heritage – and of course, all the emotional and professional blind spots that might come with kinda falling in love with someone you work with. It’s also very funny.
I did think the final chapters, while action-packed and mostly thrilling, were a little muddy! I wanted a little more exposition – who was from where, again? But I think she landed the ending – not easy to do with such a weird mix of genres, I think, and I also want to give extra points for a twist that I did not see coming, for thorough character development of the main crew of expats — and points for living in my head for 6 days after I closed the book.