I had heard almost nothing about The Ministry of Time in genre circles in the early part of this year, but it seems to have hit big enough in general fiction circles to have bled back into genre, and I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about with Kaliane Bradley’s debut. 

The Ministry of Time takes place in a near future UK that has discovered time travel and performs experiments on its effects on humans by snatching historical figures from the verge of death and bringing them to the present to—perhaps—live. The lead, a second-generation Cambodian immigrant, is tapped to help settle a temporal refugee from the lost Franklin expedition of the 1840s, only to find herself falling in love with him. But this burgeoning romance must face the danger and mistrust borne from unknown saboteurs who will stop at nothing to stop The Ministry of Time from furthering their mission. 

Perhaps it’s clear from that plot description that there’s a lot going on in this book, and it’s a proliferation of plotlines that I honestly had not gathered from other reviews before I picked this one up. General cultural osmosis made me view it as a time travel romance, and I had also seen it pitched as an immigrant story. But The Ministry of Time is trying to do a lot more than those two things, mostly to its detriment. 

By far the strongest element of The Ministry of Time is the quirky, fish-out-of-water time travel romance. There are elements that you can’t think about too hard—for instance, why choose a woman as the official roommate for a man with 1840s attitudes on propriety?—but it reads quickly and easily and plays well with some tried-and-true romance tropes. Watching a man from the past marvel at 21st century technology is always good for plenty of amusement, and the leads have enough chemistry to make for an endearing, lighthearted romance. 

But The Ministry of Time has aspirations to be much more than a lighthearted fish-out-of-water romance. It also seeks to be an espionage time travel thriller, an immigrant story, and a tale of the dangers of complicity. It’s a lot of things to do in a novel that’s barely more than 300 pages, and unfortunately, not much of it is successful. I really enjoy immigrant stories—The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar is particularly exceptional, if you don’t mind plot-light stories—but The Ministry of Time tries to draw parallels between the experience of fighting racial and cultural stereotypes as the daughter of a Cambodian living in England to the experience of a 19th century seaman living in 21st century London, and they don’t really come through. The lead spends a lot of time complaining about her treatment, and even at one point explicitly connects that experience to her treatment of her 19th century charge, but it never really feels thematically cohesive, but rather like a distraction from the tale’s main plot. 

And that main plot, contrary to every indication from the first half of the book, is not a romance but a mediocre time travel thriller. Admittedly, the hunt for a traitor within the Ministry appears early enough to set the stage for the plot to come, but it feels like an awkward tonal fit with the book’s romantic elements, with the latter setting the dominant mood. So when the romance is ultimately superseded by the thriller, it’s a jarring departure from the sort of story the novel seemed to be. And in addition to somewhat undercutting the romance, that jarring shift also affects the quality of the time travel thriller. The “don’t think about it too hard” time travel elements that are totally fine in a lighthearted romance don’t fit in a thriller, and there are ways in which the time travel mechanics simply don’t make sense that are suddenly true detriments to the story as the apparent subgenre shifts. Furthermore, the big revelations don’t have much emotional impact, because the reader is primed to focus on the romance and not worry much about the identity of the traitor. 

Finally, The Ministry of Time is a book about complicity, and again, this element is an awkward fit with the rest of the novel. Certainly, the main character is complicit in experimentation on real, live human beings from history—justified on the grounds that they were soon to die anyways. Again, this is a “don’t think too hard, just go with it” element if the story is a romance, but it then becomes perhaps the clearest example in service of the moral polemic in the conclusion of the book. But for all that the lead clearly is complicit with experimentation on temporal refugees who didn’t exactly volunteer, the novel’s chief concern is actually with climate change and the way in which Ministry research has contributed to environmental degradation. Unfortunately, the story is set up in such a way that the main character clearly has no way of knowing about said deleterious effects of research (or in many cases, of knowing any details of the research at all), so the case for complicity fails more often than it succeeds, and the ultimate resolution of the complicity plotline is an angry confrontation that’s simply hard to take seriously. 

There are a few other wobbles here and there—”the day cracked open around me. I waded through its rancidly vivid yolk, feeling damaged by the sheer color and depth of normal vision” is just one example of immersion-breakingly odd metaphors—but the main issue here is that The Ministry of Time is trying to be too many things at once. The writing style is breezy and fun and a value-add for a quirky romance, but it doesn’t tonally serve the time travel thriller or the complicity story, and the immigrant theme often feels shoehorned in and inadequately connected to the rest of the story. The novel wants to be four different things, and it only does one of them well. That one entertaining subplot keeps it a largely pleasant read, but the other three make for a scattered reading experience that deteriorates further as the book progresses. 

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Published in 2024 and Author of Color. There is also a secondary Character with a Disability.

Overall rating: 12 of Tar Vol’s 20. Three stars on Goodreads.