This debut novel is proof that publishers – and the BBC – don’t take us seriously

HMS Terror Thrown up by the Ice, March 15th 1837 by Lt William Smyth – Bridgeman

The Ministry of Time arrives with a hype that’s intense even for an industry obsessed with debuts. You may glaze over at talk of 48-hour pre-empts and 21-way auctions for screen rights, but Kaliane Bradley’s time-travelling eco-thriller was the star attraction of London Book Fair in 2023, and commercially, that matters: this February, it was announced that a BBC TV adaptation was in the works.

As it turns out, at least on a superficial level, the fuss makes a degree of sense. Set in a very-near-future England that in most respects is just like ours, Bradley’s novel is narrated by an unnamed young British-Cambodian woman who has taken a job as a “bridge” with the eponymous Ministry; she helps “expats” reintegrate into British society. The twist is that the latter have been repatriated not just, or always, from abroad, but from the depths of history, thanks to a time-door apparently developed by the Ministry with a view to assessing the viability of time travel.

Among the expats’ bewildered number are: a lesbian extracted from the Great Plague of London; an army captain from the Somme; and our narrator’s ward, Graham Gore – a naval officer who, in real life, died in 1847 aboard the doomed expedition to discover the Northwest Passage (and whose Arctic experiences are recounted here in some of the snappier chapters). A stiff and upper-lipped Victorian, albeit thrillingly sexy, he’s so mesmerised by modern conveniences that on his first day with our protagonist, he dismantles the toilet.

Though it’s extremely low-hanging fruit, there’s fun to be had in watching this brightly characterised bunch get to grips with a Britain that is, ideologically and culturally, a foreign country. (One expat shouts at the radio, thinking it contains the voice of God.) Yet the social commentary is shoehorned in, not woven, chief among them the narrator’s clunky reminders that attitudes towards women’s rights and the British Empire have changed.

Gore, at least, can be more interesting, finding the ease at which technology lets you play Bach on repeat not “respectful”, and – in a sly dig at the condescension often levelled at migrants – tartly reminding his bridge that he knows how to use a knife and fork. She, for her part, finds in Gore’s “internal displacement” a metaphor for her own family’s experience of upheaval (and one suspects that this is personal, given that Bradley herself is British-Cambodian). Much of the novel attempts a running commentary on the myth of England as it exists in the popular, possibly even refugee, imagination.

Kaliane Bradley, author of The Ministry of Time – Robin Christian

But fundamentally, The Ministry of Time is a bodge full of undeveloped ideas, tied to a plot that fizzles out even as it insists that more is becoming at stake. Given the inexplicable science, novels about time travel must create their own imaginative logic; Bradley’s design, simultaneously convoluted and threadbare, comprises little more than a vague threat from a couple of gun-toting warriors, who’ve arrived from a climate-ravaged future to avert the course of history.

There’s a disingenuous intellectualism at work here, as though merely by involving time travel and the possibility of alternative futures, the novel must be interrogating the ways in which time, identity and history are constructed. Yet The Ministry of Time is so flimsily structured, it can’t support the specifics of its own plot; besides, the writing is so confused and wayward, it’s hard to work out what the plot actually is.

This brings us to the overwhelming problem: Bradley’s prose. On this evidence, it’s astonishing that she won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize in 2022. Reading The Ministry of Time is like wading through a bog of undigested imagery and overwrought sentences. Bradley loves a simile so much that a character can barely exist without suffering one, as when a Ministry employee has “a presence… as mild as salad”. Some metaphors are incomprehensible: “She pulled a modern face, crowded with punchline.” Others work against her. At one point, early in the narrator’s acquaintance with Gore – it’s no spoiler to tell you that she’ll soon fall in love with him – the narrator says: “We spent the rest of the day bobbing shyly around each other like clots in a lava lamp.” But the wax droplets in lava lamps combine, I thought, as well as separate.

A decent editor might have knocked some of The Ministry of Time into shape. In doing so, they would have better served a debut novelist who clearly, beneath it all, has some ability. Yet, as so often feels the case these days, the touch of that editor is nowhere to be found. Over to the BBC, then. Good luck; you have your work cut out.

The Ministry of Time is published by Sceptre at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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