Ministry of Time

There's been a bit of buzz around 'The Ministry of Time' by Kaliane Bradley (who strangely doesn't have a website), and as soon as I searched I find that the BBC has already commissioned a drama. It will make excellent telly I'm sure. I like books that emerge from clever ideas, but sometimes come to feel that the clever idea becomes its defining feature, characters and style becoming secondary. Not true of this book as the people are all wonderfully drawn and the relationships between them strong and believable.

A secret government project has acquired a time door, through which they have bought several people from the past into the 21st century. It is never clear why these particular people have been chosen, nor what they are supposed to do now there are here. The current world is a disaster, falling into a climate change driven chaos. The focus of the story is Graham Gore, a member of an arctic expedition from 1847 and his unnamed 'bridge' (who tells the story), whose job is to help him acclimatise to the modern world. He is a real person from history (as opposed to an invented character) and the story is interspersed with extracts about the progress of the expedition, which consists of two trapped ships struggling to survive the winter, starving and freezing, and hoping for warmer weather to free them from the ice. 

This first quote from 1847; Gore has shot an Esquimaux, mistaking the shape of the person stooping in the snow for a seal when out hunting for food, and the tribe and his widow, come to the ship:

"'I'm sorry,' he says, in English, because he forgot to ask Crozier how to say it in her language. She looks at him.

He should get to his knees. Offer his throat to the edge of her palm. Or maybe he should offer her his hand, to replace the hands of her husband. Brief wildness beats at his skull. Perhaps, after a manhood with no final home, fixing makeshift families in multiple wardrooms, killing and pinning land to maps, God has cast him on the shore by this woman. Years of his finger on the trigger  to make sense of her expression.

'I'm sorry,' he repeats. She looks at him. After the group leave, taking their gifts, the stare will linger on his body. When he washes up in his cabin that night, he feels it slip under his shirt, growing into his skin." (p.185)

Of course an extended period of close companionship forges their relationship into something more intense; 

"I blinked at him, and then I looked up. It was true. Away from the grubby muslin of London's light pollution, in the fresh March night, the sky was full of stars. I turned back to him. As I adjusted to the dark, I could see he was staring upwards.

'I can't manage it exactly without a sextant,' he said. 'But I want to be able to orientate myself.'

'So that, in the event of London flooding when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?'

'So that I will know where I was when I met you.'

I has always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn't know what to do.

'Come here,' he said softly, and pulled me into his arms.

I pressed my face against his neck. My body sparked and I couldn't move it, except to lean into him. I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I'd committed a crime to get it. No one had given me permission to feel this way, and I thought I might not be allowed it. He combed his fingers through my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it." (p.258-9)

People arrive from the future, with a weapon, and the refugees from the past are forced to flee for their lives. And things just got more complicated from there, and I'm still not sure what was going on. Will definitely be watching the series when it materialises.

Stay safe. Be kind. Be wary of that job that seem too good to be true.