A fresh, sharp novel that could lose the internet-level humour
HE WAS, above all things, a charming man. In every century they make themselves at home.” Which, in the case of Graham Gore, a Victorian naval commander plucked from a doomed polar expedition to a nearfuture London, means learning how to ride a motorbike (in leathers), use Google (“what is miso paste?”) and cook pho (if not quite pronounce it).
It also means falling in love with his housemate — a civil servant helping him adjust to his new era on behalf of the Ministry of Time, the shadowy government department that lends its name to Kaliane Bradley’s witty, thrilling and enormously ambitious debut novel. Her ambition was shared by publishers — 21 bid for the book — and the BBC, which already has an adaptation in the works.
She sets her story in a version of 2020s London, almost but not quite the same as our own. The Government has stumbled upon a means of travelling through time; now it is working out whether humans can survive it by taking five “expats” from their own eras
Graham Gore, a Victorian naval commander, is plucked from a doomed expedition to modern London
and bringing them to the future. Gore, a real Arctic explorer lost on a mission to find the Northwest Passage in the 1840s, is one of them. Each is assigned a civil servant, or “bridge”, who will live with them for a year and teach them how to assimilate into modern society.
Gore’s bridge, a sardonic, self-deprecating and never-named translator, is our narrator.
The attraction and dislocation between the two, separated as they are by two centuries, sets the tone of the tale, billed as part romance, part comedy, part sci-fi.
On top of that genre mash-up it dances, sometimes precariously, between being a powerfully drawn love story, an insider’s takedown of murky bureaucracy, an action thriller and an analysis of topics that don’t get much space in, say, The Time Traveller’s Wife — climate change; racism; the refugee crisis; the British empire; genocide.
It is, as the bridge would say, a lot. In fact, it’s so full of ideas that occasionally it feels as though about four books are fighting to get out at once.
Bradley’s deeper point, though, is to illuminate the inconsolable pain of being a refugee: of knowing your home is gone forever. I could have read pages more of Gore and the other expats; pages fewer of the narrator’s sometimes internet-level humour. But sometimes you just have to close your eyes and hang on. It’s a fun ride.
• The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley (Sceptre, £16.99) is published next Tuesday
• Fiona Roberts-Moore is the Evening Standard’s assistant editor (production)