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I was intrigued by the concept of this one (blurb: In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering 'expats' from across history to test the limits of time-travel. Her role is to work as a 'bridge': living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as '1847' - Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as 'washing machine', 'Spotify' and 'the collapse of the British Empire'. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long and sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more. But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?)( Read more... )
I would still rate the book as four stars out of five, because those elements in which it is really interested it does do very well, and the authorial context is irrelevant to the work itself (the recent craze for censoring works based on the perceived misdeeds of their creators leaves me completely bemused). But I'm afraid it's not as outstanding as I hoped at one point it was going to be... ultimately, I think, because the ending *ought* to be emotionally devastating and -- for me at least-- for whatever reason it just wasn't.
(Apparently the BBC is going to make it into a TV series https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/the-ministry-of-time
And I shall probably watch it, just as I did watch "The Terror" -- and do genuinely prefer the fictionalised 'flashbacks' to the Franklin expedition in this book to the version in that one!)
I would still rate the book as four stars out of five, because those elements in which it is really interested it does do very well, and the authorial context is irrelevant to the work itself (the recent craze for censoring works based on the perceived misdeeds of their creators leaves me completely bemused). But I'm afraid it's not as outstanding as I hoped at one point it was going to be... ultimately, I think, because the ending *ought* to be emotionally devastating and -- for me at least-- for whatever reason it just wasn't.
(Apparently the BBC is going to make it into a TV series https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/the-ministry-of-time
And I shall probably watch it, just as I did watch "The Terror" -- and do genuinely prefer the fictionalised 'flashbacks' to the Franklin expedition in this book to the version in that one!)