I chose this read because I was excited to see a romance on the list of finalists for the Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards. It’s not everyday that a sci-fi romance has a chance at winning a big, well-known science fiction award, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
And, oh my heart, The Ministry of Time did not disappoint. This novel delves far beyond the usual territory of your average romance or even your average sci-fi story, tackling big issues in a poignant and nuanced way.
The main character is a Ministry linguist who has failed her field agent exam and instead applies to work at a new, mysterious government agency–The Ministry of Time–where she’s assigned to monitor a naval commander who’s been kidnapped from the Victorian Era. The commander would have died in an Arctic expedition, and has been brought to present-day London as an experiment in the feasibility of time travel.
At first the story plays out as you’d expect from the tried-and-true romance trope where a modern woman falls for a charming, old-timey gentleman. There’s all the fun banter and hilarious moments of cultural clash you’d expect as Commander Gore learns about refrigerators and Spotify and the fact that it’s now considered appropriate for women to show their ankles.
But Bradley also takes her exploration of Gore’s perspective on modern times further, forcing the main character to explain difficult moments in history and letting her struggle to justify a social structure fraught with contradiction and hypocrisy.
If that was the extent of the novel’s depth, this would have been a fun but predictable read.
But as the two characters fall for each other and time travelling agents begin to threaten their lives, the novel not only becomes more like a spy thriller, but Bradley also goes from an exploration of big-picture institutional and societal level contradictions to an in-your-face, person-to-person level examining of how these contradictions play out in our individual lives. She tackles tough and all-too-true contradictions like the way we can love someone and yet treat them as an object. The way we can fool ourselves into believing we’re not individually responsible for our actions when we have institutions and ideals to hide behind. The way forgiveness and hope might change the future.
The thing I most appreciate about this novel, though, is the nuance that the main character’s ethnic heritage brings to the story.
Both the author and the FMC are of British-Cambodian descent, and the novel’s portrayal of life as a bi-racial person who appears white is so spot on that I had to take a break from reading this book for a week or so because it was making me too emotional. It’s a little too real at times, but I truly appreciate the small, uncomfortable details. I think this may be the first time I’ve ever come across a portrayal that felt so affirming of my own life experience.
I hope readers notice this aspect of the story, because living through a character’s eyes is one of the best ways to develop empathy.
Through the main character’s eyes, we get a taste of what it feels like to defy peoples preconceived categories, and how their reactions can shape us.
In my own experience as a person with parents of two different ethnicities, when you claim either heritage, people behave as if that gives them the right to judge you and categorize you and decide whether you’re deserving of the heritage you’ve claimed, the life you have, your perspectives, your name, even. As if it’s their job to decide whether your existence as a human being is valid. When you grow up with this, it can make you believe you don’t have a right to be yourself without other peoples’ permission. It can make you hide, try to fly under the radar to escape judgment, work too hard either to fit in or to stand out.
And judgment from strangers isn’t even the hard part. The hard part is that not even your family can relate, because your parents and your grandparents and your aunts and uncles have only lived the experience of one heritage. At the same time, other people with mixed heritage don’t necessarily understand, either, because their specific experience is different from yours.
As the narrator of The Ministry of Time says, “‘Mixed-race’ people don’t technically belong to either of their heritage spaces, but they don’t necessarily belong in a ‘mixed-race’ space either–there’s too much flex in that term. I used to think every mixed-race person was an island, composed of a population of one.”
That sense of alienation and vicious loneliness is so evident as the main character embarks on a cutthroat mission to fit in, not realizing that her deep distrust is pushing away the people she cares for the most.
She later realizes, “I’d made myself an island of one, and now I was going under the waves.”
There’s a whole other layer to the main character’s experience of her heritage as the daughter of a first gen immigrant, and as the daughter of a mother who has experienced extreme trauma. I’ve never experienced this and I’d never thought about how these kinds of generational experiences can shape a person.
These aspects of the main character’s heritage and her struggle to accept her own identity add a layer of nuance and depth to the story as a whole. Combined with the author’s poetic knack for distilling familiar experiences down to their essence, these aspects makes the story feel as real as if it were a memoir written by a real government agent. And this realism in turn makes the speculative elements seem plausible.
I was totally engrossed and wholly invested in the outcome.
It must have been tricky for the author to make this a true romance with a happily ever after ending. How do you wrap up a story as nuanced as this one up in a hopeful, romantic way that doesn’t feel so Hallmarky that it devalues the realities the story highlights. Somehow, Bradley pulled it off. The Ministry of Time is a true HEA romance with a satisfying ending that’s far from trite.
This one is a definite contender for my favourite read of the year. And, by the way, it ended up winning that Readers’ Choice award for best sci-fi. There’s no doubt in my mind this book deserves the award. I highly recommend The Ministry of Time, but read it when you’re in the mood for something more than pure escapism. It’s a little too real to feel perfectly comfortable.
