luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)'s Reviews > The Ministry of Time

dnf

i am baffled by the hype surrounding this book; not only has been blurbed by several 'big' authors, but apparently it's also slated for adaptation into a BBC drama. i have questions...

to use an overused term, this book is mid. inoffensive, if you will. it's doing nothing new, and it is written in the kind of witty (usually) British voice that seems rather derivative of authors like Diana Wynne Jones, possibly even Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. but the wit here is missing their spark. nor does the book have the same delightfully satirical tone Zen Cho's historical fantasies. the storytelling here feels lacklustre & vanilla.

right from the outset, the book's attempts at self-awareness about the tropes of its genre ("anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel […] will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work?") backfire, as we are offered a generic explanation of time-travel along the lines of "[D]on't worry about it. All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time".

what made absolutely 0 sense to me was not so much the time-travelling and the lack of explanation around it, but the identity of these 'expats' (would they really 'rescue' someone who was in the midst of a war? surely they would consider them unsuitable, or too much of a risk, given that they are bound to have some form of ptsd and might believe that they have been captured by the 'enemy), and their 'bridges'.
we're led to believe that their bridges undergo careful selection and multiple interviews, yet our protagonist seems entirely ill-suited for the task at hand. it would have been more logical for someone with an understanding of the expat's era to care for them. moreover, the notion that these time expats wouldn't be institutionalized but instead released to live with their bridges seems implausible.
and would they really place them in London? surely it would have made more sense to find safehouses in the countryside, as opposed to smackbam in the middle of modernity.
despite the considerable resources invested in extracting them, they're entrusted to a single individual who promptly forgets their surveillance duties, allowing them to wander the city alone?

it's nonsensical. while i'm willing to suspend disbelief regarding time travel, if i'm to buy into this 'ministry', it should feel less slapdash.

i skimmed ahead and saw how the romance subplot would unfold...if anything the romance made the story all the banal. why can't we have significant non-romantic relationships between male and female main characters? must it inevitably result in a romance, even here? the optics were dubious, akin to a therapist and their patient embarking on a romantic relationship.

given all the buzz around this novel, i recognise that i am an outlier and chances are that it will be a hit for most readers (i just happen not be one of them). i recommend giving this novel a shot and forming your own opinion. YMMV and all that jazz.