A woman working for the Ministry of Time is tasked with helping assimilate a sailor pulled through time, who more than a hundred years prior was on a doomed Arctic expedition and would have died otherwise. Hijinks ensue.
Another novel to put on the list where we have a bunch of smaller sections within larger paragraphs acting as scene transitions and POV switches.
Most of these sections are bookended with the usual leading statement that writers end chapters with but these are written so well here and are so densely packed that it gives the whole novel an easy to read, brisk pace.
NB: Held(Anne Michaels) also does this to some extent with a focus on shorter sections and less leading statements.
This trend makes sense to me in the world of shrinking attention spans we live in. It’s excruciatingly hard to get the average person (man?) to pick up a book when our brains have been trained by our phones to crave the constant dripfeed of dopamine provided by a like or an exploding pinata of loot.
I expect to see more and more books written this way to cater to this growing demographic of people. This isn’t bad per-say just a prediction.
I didn’t know anything about the Ministry of Time before picking it up and reading it other than it being in contention for the Best Novel of 2024 in certain circles (at least that’s what I had understood prior to picking it up).
I “get” it. It’s an ambitious novel that succeeds at combining multiple genres that usually don’t mix in a way that really works.
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time is something like three parts romance, one part thriller, one part history fiction and one part science fiction. At its heart, its a romance. There’s the constant longing and desire expressed by the protagonist and the “will they won’t they” throughline that is used to prop up all the other genre tropes Bradley is masterfully juggling.
What surprised me most about The Ministry of Time was the tone. It’s vulgar, it’s funny, it’s sarcastic all ways that feel natural to me but I don’t often see in the novels I read.
Kaliane Bradley, and the narrator in The Ministry of Time, is a “passing” mixed race person raised by an immigrant mother displaced from her country and her people. This is relevant to my experience of reading through the novel because it comes up a lot in the text and because this is also my lived experience.
I can’t say that Bradley’s portrayal of this sexy AF sailor plucked straight from the Victorian era speaks to me but there’s a lot in the Ministry of Time that does. And, it seems obvious to me that is partially because Bradley, the narrator and I all share this common history and how important it is to our understanding who we are, where we belong and how we interact with the world.
It’s good, it’s entertaining and I feel comfortable boosting the signal of the Ministry of Time in my own little way because of how well it portrays a lived experience of mine that I’ve never been able to put into words. Seeing parts of that lived experience expressed in this work that’s doing so many other impressive warms my heart.
Although, I wonder what Bradley’s next novel will look like considering that she’s obviously self-inserted parts of herself (in a very fan fiction-y way) into the text, as the narrator. What will her next protagonist look like?
Spoilers for the book below
The romance-ness of the text…
The sex scenes are pretty explicit (a bit less so than in The Extinction of Irena Rey(Jennifer Croft) though).