A review by chichio
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

adventurous reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You’ll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in. When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn’t see it. 
 
At its very core this book is about displacement, assimilation and the ways in which someone must shroud or completely abandon the truth of themselves in order to better fit into society, to better succeed. I really enjoyed the constant parallels drawn between these white expats and their bridges from ethnic minority groups—it was interesting seeing the ways the expats did better at blending in despite being from a different time, all because of the ever-present privilege of their whiteness or their maleness.  
 
There’s also a broader discussion about political correctness and how shallow some people who engage with such practices can be. Our narrator claims political correctness, claims the wide acceptance expected from a more modern person, yet we watch her fall short throughout the whole book. Despite the narrator’s personal shortcomings, the narrative voice here is just so entertaining that it doesn’t matter. There’s a very dry, unbelievably British sense of humour threaded throughout this novel that just works so well for me. And… the prose? Argh. Such skilful use of metaphor for a debut novel. 
 
Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel. 
 
“Little cat” as a pet name? OH I COULD JUST DIE. SO FUCKING CUTE I WANT TO EAT MY ARM OFF. 

I think the ending botched the overall novel, though. It got really messy and convoluted (in a way a lot of time travel media often does) which is a shame. I’ll probably reread to try and wrap my head around it a little more but doing that with time travel stories is more likely to uncover more plot holes than fill in any. I also don’t think the author writes very compelling action scenes so the stakes never felt that high to me tbh. Like I never felt the danger. Oh well. Still, this was such a fun read and I loved the message.