The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I’ve been trying more often to read novels with no knowledge about their plot. I don’t remember when I decided to start doing this, nor do I remember there being a single dramatic “this is the last straw” type event that pushed me into this slightly unconventional approach to fiction. But I’m enjoying it, because even the most anodyne back-cover or inside-flap synopses typically actually reveal quite a lot about a book’s plot. Going in completely ignorant means I’m not saddled with expectations about what I think a book “should” be based on a summary whose purpose is to sell me something. (And it’s interesting to read these summaries for the first time after I’ve read the book being summarized.)

I did this with The Ministry of Time, and in retrospect I think the book jacket’s summary would have left me room to be surprised as the story sort of cycles through various genres as it runs its course. I found its leisurely, comedic first section to be the most enjoyable, but even as the various temporal “expats” charmingly meet and get to know one another, there’s considerable foreshadowing that the novel will become something more grim and distressing. It ends up feelin a bit unbalanced, and an awful lot happens in the last two chapters, but it does at least feel decently set up by the narrator’s many ominous musings interspersed with the situational comedy/slice-of-life/romance that precedes everything going pretty much to hell.

How much you will like The Ministry of Time may depend on your patience for the author’s specific brand of self-indulgence, expressed both in similes like “my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect’s foot on the meniscus of a pond” and in, well, writing a novel which is basically a self-insert fan fiction about a hot Victorian sailor. For the most part, I loved it. The similes were evocative and gorgeous way more often than they were confusing or overwrought and the fish-out-of-water antics of the expats were consistently charming and often hilarious.

Aside from its being a bit tonally abrupt, I do feel the ending worked well the more I think about it. It brings in a lot of heaviness that’s hinted at in the preceding material: some by the narrator’s own retrospectively expressed regrets and some by increasingly adversarial conversations between her and the Ministry’s only other non-white character that are so laden with subtext I had a lot of trouble picking up on what was really going on. But what I was able to glean was that the main character’s willful ignorance (a self-defence mechanism, one supposes, not unrelated to her ethnicity and those fraught conversations) about what’s going on at the edges of her scope of influence at the Ministry leads her to be blindsided when it turns out to be less than benign. Despite that she’s pretty clearly a less-than-reliable narrator, I was caught off guard by it too.

Like my recent tendency to dive into novels with no foreknowledge of their plot, I’ve realized one of my characteristics as a fiction reader is guilelessness.Naïveté, if you prefer.

When a book has a big twist or surprising reveal, I very rarely see it coming. I like books with unreliable narrators because they fool me every time. And in the case of The Ministry of Time, the unnamed narrator’s blind spots became my own. So it’s possible that I felt caught off-guard by the ending because, like the narrator, I was just not seeing the signs. But it sure was fun until the shit hit the fan.