Read With Us: The Ministry of Time

Last week, Carole gave you an introduction to our current Read With Us selection, The Ministry of Time. This week I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this time travel, romance, spy thriller, science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction novel. It's a combination of many genres, hard to classify, and there is a lot going on in this book. 

I'm always interested in how authors deal with time travel and I especially love Kaliane Bradley's take on the subject. At the beginning of the book, she presents time travel as a relatively inexplicable phenomenon, saying that “the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit.” When she was asked about this in an interview, the author gives what I think is a great answer:

"Time travel is such a weighted trope. When you write about time travel, you’re not just writing about time travel; you’re writing your own outline for the shape of the universe. Do you subscribe to Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” theory of history, or does history come from below, from the people? Is time a series of linear events, expanding into unfixed futures; or is “time” complete and whole, regardless of the human perception? Does time travel always have to draw on our (rich and varied) hard sci-fi tradition, especially if the author has barely a gnat’s grasp on quantum physics?

Well, what I wanted to do was write about this one sexy polar explorer. So I shut all those questions down ASAP.

I’m joking. The book is told from the point of view of a woman for whom these questions are so many ontological fart noises; it would have rung false for her to try and explain the fictional physics. She perceives history as a human subject, so she flags early on that what she’s telling is not a conceptual story, but a human one."

About that sexy polar explorer...

Bradley says “I wrote this book kind of by accident." During the pandemic, she took refuge in the TV series The Terror (based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), a supernatural horror about Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. She was especially drawn to one of the crew, Lt. Graham Gore, who dies two episodes in at the age of 38. While looking for more information about Graham Gore, Bradley was struck by a Wikipedia description of him as “a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers”.

“I was in such a state at this point in my life that I thought, ‘You’d be handling the pandemic better than me,’” she laughs. She was smitten. A dashing portrait of Gore now sits in her study.

Gore led her to seek out other polar exploration enthusiasts online, “quite a community, it turns out”. She began writing what would become The Ministry of Time in installments for them: kind of “a nerdy literary parlour game” imagining what it might be like to have her favourite explorer – Gore – move in with you. “It just kept spinning out and I kept on going,” she says, writing 400 words or so in the evenings. “It was just so much fun.” About halfway through, one of her new online friends said, “I think this is a novel.”

And so it is, one I hope you'll Read With Us. 

Kym, Carole, and I will be talking about the book, giving additional information, and doing promotional posts throughout July. Discussion day for The Ministry of Time is scheduled for Tuesday, September 17, 2024, at 7:00 pm Eastern time, so mark your calendars. We'll ask questions on our blogs that day and then host the always fun, educational, and entertaining Zoom discussion.

The hardcover, Kindle, and audio versions of the book are all available from my library with a bit of a wait. Hopefully, we'll all have plenty of time to place a hold, get the book, and read it.  The Kindle and hardcover versions are priced reasonably on Amazon and I'm sure your local bookseller could order a copy for you if you're lucky enough to have a local bookseller. I found that the dual approach of listening to the audio version and reading it on my Kindle worked well for me. 

I do hope you'll read The Ministry of Time with us. It's a genre-defying book with an intriguing cover and an original premise. I have read it once and I'm hoping that a re-read in late August or early September will answer some of my questions and make things clearer for me. (I will admit to being a bit confused about the ending.)

Come Read The Ministry of Time With Us!