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igenlodeI 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?)
And a lot of it is very, very good; I was reminded of the John Wyndham of "The Kraken Wakes" or "The Triffids" or (in a different way) his short story "Chronoclasm". The protagonist is a small cog in a big machine, dealing on a very personal and human level with potentially world-shaking events but focused largely on the day-to-day. The author's handling of the culture clash between the characters is pretty much perfect; she clearly knows her period intimately (I'm not so convinced by her version of the seventeenth century) and, what is all-important, sympathetically. Neither side is altogether 'right' and neither side is altogether 'wrong' -- their assumptions are simply foreign to one another, and Gore is recognisable and entirely convincing as an educated and broad-minded man of the earlier nineteenth century stepping into an unexpected future that threatens values he has always taken for granted (in more directions than one: Women's Lib is a shock, but more so Auschwitz). People may label him as 'Victorian', but from the viewpoint of 1847 most of that era is as alien to his world as the 20th century -- a perspective that historical fiction and its generic 'past' so very often forgets! And the author handles the social niceties with skill and understanding as well, like the far more intimate and relaxed way he interacts in a (to him normal) all-male context, as opposed to his cautious navigation of the relationship with her.
Meanwhile it's one thing to *say* that a character is withdrawn but charming, and quite another to actually succeed in writing him as self-evidently charming, but in this case the author really pulls it off -- and doesn't even say it until after the reader has already come to the same conclusion! I may have been biased because I found myself identifying so hard through large chunks of this (and was in consequence very grateful that Gore was permitted by the narrative to retain much of his personal and physical reticence rather than being 'reformed' into modern ideas), but in fact the character also fitted very neatly into one of my favourite tropes, that of the inhabitant of the past who uses the skills of his own day to overcome the 'self-evident' advantages of modern technology rather than being over-awed by them.
All the same, the book is not afraid to give him the attitudes that we *know* his contemporaries had, even when these involve him butting his head against the facts (his complete refusal of the idea that the men he knew could ever have eaten dead bodies, for instance, when modern archaeology can not only draw that deduction irrefutably from physical evidence, but doesn't even find the idea intrinsically horrific; when people don't need their bodies any more, why should they grudge them to the survivors who would otherwise starve?) It's an extremely skilled and plausible piece of historical ventriloquism, and I feel that this was probably the main point of the book -- the author is rather less secure on the futuristic elements than on the past. More on that later.
The other aspect with which I was very impressed is that she manages to depict a close non-romantic male/female friendship, which is rarely done in fiction... *and* then to convert that into a romantic relationship, a development I'd normally resent, while successfully keeping me on board despite the potentially hackneyed outcome! (I think it was probably helped by the fact that this was basically announced by the blurb in advance, so I was going in with that subconscious expectation...) But she *does* pull off a touching and very successful romance between her characters, although by about halfway through the book I found myself conscious of an active hope that Commander Gore and indeed all the other 'expats' were invented characters from history rather than actual historical people of record, because it didn't seem somehow quite decent to fictionalise them so vividly and vulnerably. (Again, more on that later: it turns out Gore was definitely a real-life member of the Franklin expedition, albeit not one whose name I recognised, but I'm guessing the others really were the author's own invention?)
On the other hand, if it hadn't been for the blurb I probably wouldn't have realised that this was intended to be a 'near-future' setting at all but just taken it for the present day. There are some rather clumsy references to climate change causing hot summers (the "sultry" of the dust-jacket is in fact quite literal in intent :-p) and a very clumsy reference to Covid, and that's about it; since all the technology involved is supposed to be secret from the general public and the 'Ministry' is an unnamed bureaucratic operation -- and the whole thing has a slightly retro feel again reminiscent of John Wyndham, where it would easily fit into the world of "The Midwich Cuckoos", with faceless government departments using people as pawns -- there is no real feeling that we are in the future at all. It pretty much comes across as a handwave to cover the author's back, like the film disclaimers that "any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental" even on those that are advertised as 'based on a true story'. And the futuristic elements that do exist are pretty generic: a B-movie ray-gun-like weapon, and of course the concept of the time machine itself.
The revelation of Adela's real identity works well, because she has been set up as slightly odd from the start, and provides a plausible rationale for why our (un-named -- although confusingly she seems to be called 'Sarah' on one single occasion, which doesn't fit with earlier hints that her name is something weird and unpronounceable) protagonist gets enlisted into the job in the first place, and why they don't simply kill her off instead of paying her to go away. I didn't find the idea at all plausible that "Sal and the Brigadier" are *known* to be enemy agents and are yet allowed intimate access to the time-travel programme, presenting themselves as senior authority figures, without any warning to the participants, although it's an interesting idea that the Brigadier's old-fashioned elements, which led me at one point to suspect that he was the result of a previous experiment, *actually* derive from his having travelled back from the future with a generic idea of what 'the past' was like (see again "Chronoclasm"; I wonder if the author actually is a Wyndham fan, or if both writers are simply poking fun at the tendencies of historical fiction to ignore the distinctions between periods, as mentioned above!)
Sal doesn't say much, but his brief and largely incomprehensible utterances start to make sense once you realise that they are jargon from another era -- so to "null" someone is to dispose of them and "rec null" is a recommendation to kill... But the whole time-travel plot feels a bit cursory, I'm afraid, as if the author isn't nearly so confident with this material and just wants an excuse for the bit she is really interested in, which is the culture-clash romance. The ending ought to be a taut thriller about betrayal and love versus trust/honour, but I didn't find that it had nearly as much impact as the long earlier sections in which basically nothing much happens.
We do get foreshadowing throughout the book that something is going to go horribly wrong and that the narrator is recalling a happy time in retrospect, but when things do go wrong, I think it somehow gets let down by the fact that the author just isn't all that *good* at action sequences. About three-quarters of the book is an easy five stars out of five, but then once the high-octane spy thriller material kicks in it ends up as a bit of a let-down... which I did rather fear was going to happen, given that those hinted-at elements had been left very much in the background compared to the general character work up to that point :-(
Of the 'expats', only Graham Gore and Arthur, who should have died on the Somme, really came to life for me; the two men have a lot culturally in common, despite having lived about seventy years apart. Margaret, the 17th-century lesbian who was shut up and left to die during the Great Plague, is a fairly major character in the protagonists' lives, but she adapts so quickly to modern life while speaking in broad cod-Shakespearian that I found it hard to see her as an actual 1660s woman. The unfortunate Lieutenant Cardington from the Civil War gets fairly short shrift in terms of characterization... although it's an unexpectedly adventurous choice by the author to have him end up as Gore's sole ally, given that in our brief earlier glimpses he has been depicted as so unpleasant and so eager to return to the frontline that one would expect him to end up working for the Ministry instead. The other two expats we don't really see at all: one dies off-screen (it is hinted that she never really recovered from her husband's death just before she was rescued) and I think the sixth must have died during retrieval, because I have absolutely no recollection of who it can have been...
But my real shock, I'm afraid, came when I had finished the book and read on through the author's page, whereupon it became rapidly obvious that what I had in my hands was not just an uncomfortably intrusive romance with a man who had actually existed, but an openly admitted self-insert fanfic for the TV show "The Terror", with the protagonist with whom Gore falls in love being very clearly based on the writer herself, her complex background not a case of literary invention but simply autobiography. It's one of those cases where it would have been very much better not to have known anything about the background to the book; she was basically an Arctic history fan who became obsessed with one of the people she was researching and wrote a fantasy (originally only meant to be shared with a small group of friends) in which she comes up with an excuse to bring him to the present day so that he can have hot sex with her. Real Person Fic isn't something I've ever been comfortable with (and there is, I feel, a distinct even if intangible difference between that and writing a historical novel in which your characters are interacting with known figures from history, like Rosemary Hawley Jarman's "We Speak No Treason", or even where your first-person protagonist *is* a real historical figure, as in Philippa Gregory's "The White Queen").
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!)
And a lot of it is very, very good; I was reminded of the John Wyndham of "The Kraken Wakes" or "The Triffids" or (in a different way) his short story "Chronoclasm". The protagonist is a small cog in a big machine, dealing on a very personal and human level with potentially world-shaking events but focused largely on the day-to-day. The author's handling of the culture clash between the characters is pretty much perfect; she clearly knows her period intimately (I'm not so convinced by her version of the seventeenth century) and, what is all-important, sympathetically. Neither side is altogether 'right' and neither side is altogether 'wrong' -- their assumptions are simply foreign to one another, and Gore is recognisable and entirely convincing as an educated and broad-minded man of the earlier nineteenth century stepping into an unexpected future that threatens values he has always taken for granted (in more directions than one: Women's Lib is a shock, but more so Auschwitz). People may label him as 'Victorian', but from the viewpoint of 1847 most of that era is as alien to his world as the 20th century -- a perspective that historical fiction and its generic 'past' so very often forgets! And the author handles the social niceties with skill and understanding as well, like the far more intimate and relaxed way he interacts in a (to him normal) all-male context, as opposed to his cautious navigation of the relationship with her.
Meanwhile it's one thing to *say* that a character is withdrawn but charming, and quite another to actually succeed in writing him as self-evidently charming, but in this case the author really pulls it off -- and doesn't even say it until after the reader has already come to the same conclusion! I may have been biased because I found myself identifying so hard through large chunks of this (and was in consequence very grateful that Gore was permitted by the narrative to retain much of his personal and physical reticence rather than being 'reformed' into modern ideas), but in fact the character also fitted very neatly into one of my favourite tropes, that of the inhabitant of the past who uses the skills of his own day to overcome the 'self-evident' advantages of modern technology rather than being over-awed by them.
All the same, the book is not afraid to give him the attitudes that we *know* his contemporaries had, even when these involve him butting his head against the facts (his complete refusal of the idea that the men he knew could ever have eaten dead bodies, for instance, when modern archaeology can not only draw that deduction irrefutably from physical evidence, but doesn't even find the idea intrinsically horrific; when people don't need their bodies any more, why should they grudge them to the survivors who would otherwise starve?) It's an extremely skilled and plausible piece of historical ventriloquism, and I feel that this was probably the main point of the book -- the author is rather less secure on the futuristic elements than on the past. More on that later.
The other aspect with which I was very impressed is that she manages to depict a close non-romantic male/female friendship, which is rarely done in fiction... *and* then to convert that into a romantic relationship, a development I'd normally resent, while successfully keeping me on board despite the potentially hackneyed outcome! (I think it was probably helped by the fact that this was basically announced by the blurb in advance, so I was going in with that subconscious expectation...) But she *does* pull off a touching and very successful romance between her characters, although by about halfway through the book I found myself conscious of an active hope that Commander Gore and indeed all the other 'expats' were invented characters from history rather than actual historical people of record, because it didn't seem somehow quite decent to fictionalise them so vividly and vulnerably. (Again, more on that later: it turns out Gore was definitely a real-life member of the Franklin expedition, albeit not one whose name I recognised, but I'm guessing the others really were the author's own invention?)
On the other hand, if it hadn't been for the blurb I probably wouldn't have realised that this was intended to be a 'near-future' setting at all but just taken it for the present day. There are some rather clumsy references to climate change causing hot summers (the "sultry" of the dust-jacket is in fact quite literal in intent :-p) and a very clumsy reference to Covid, and that's about it; since all the technology involved is supposed to be secret from the general public and the 'Ministry' is an unnamed bureaucratic operation -- and the whole thing has a slightly retro feel again reminiscent of John Wyndham, where it would easily fit into the world of "The Midwich Cuckoos", with faceless government departments using people as pawns -- there is no real feeling that we are in the future at all. It pretty much comes across as a handwave to cover the author's back, like the film disclaimers that "any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental" even on those that are advertised as 'based on a true story'. And the futuristic elements that do exist are pretty generic: a B-movie ray-gun-like weapon, and of course the concept of the time machine itself.
The revelation of Adela's real identity works well, because she has been set up as slightly odd from the start, and provides a plausible rationale for why our (un-named -- although confusingly she seems to be called 'Sarah' on one single occasion, which doesn't fit with earlier hints that her name is something weird and unpronounceable) protagonist gets enlisted into the job in the first place, and why they don't simply kill her off instead of paying her to go away. I didn't find the idea at all plausible that "Sal and the Brigadier" are *known* to be enemy agents and are yet allowed intimate access to the time-travel programme, presenting themselves as senior authority figures, without any warning to the participants, although it's an interesting idea that the Brigadier's old-fashioned elements, which led me at one point to suspect that he was the result of a previous experiment, *actually* derive from his having travelled back from the future with a generic idea of what 'the past' was like (see again "Chronoclasm"; I wonder if the author actually is a Wyndham fan, or if both writers are simply poking fun at the tendencies of historical fiction to ignore the distinctions between periods, as mentioned above!)
Sal doesn't say much, but his brief and largely incomprehensible utterances start to make sense once you realise that they are jargon from another era -- so to "null" someone is to dispose of them and "rec null" is a recommendation to kill... But the whole time-travel plot feels a bit cursory, I'm afraid, as if the author isn't nearly so confident with this material and just wants an excuse for the bit she is really interested in, which is the culture-clash romance. The ending ought to be a taut thriller about betrayal and love versus trust/honour, but I didn't find that it had nearly as much impact as the long earlier sections in which basically nothing much happens.
We do get foreshadowing throughout the book that something is going to go horribly wrong and that the narrator is recalling a happy time in retrospect, but when things do go wrong, I think it somehow gets let down by the fact that the author just isn't all that *good* at action sequences. About three-quarters of the book is an easy five stars out of five, but then once the high-octane spy thriller material kicks in it ends up as a bit of a let-down... which I did rather fear was going to happen, given that those hinted-at elements had been left very much in the background compared to the general character work up to that point :-(
Of the 'expats', only Graham Gore and Arthur, who should have died on the Somme, really came to life for me; the two men have a lot culturally in common, despite having lived about seventy years apart. Margaret, the 17th-century lesbian who was shut up and left to die during the Great Plague, is a fairly major character in the protagonists' lives, but she adapts so quickly to modern life while speaking in broad cod-Shakespearian that I found it hard to see her as an actual 1660s woman. The unfortunate Lieutenant Cardington from the Civil War gets fairly short shrift in terms of characterization... although it's an unexpectedly adventurous choice by the author to have him end up as Gore's sole ally, given that in our brief earlier glimpses he has been depicted as so unpleasant and so eager to return to the frontline that one would expect him to end up working for the Ministry instead. The other two expats we don't really see at all: one dies off-screen (it is hinted that she never really recovered from her husband's death just before she was rescued) and I think the sixth must have died during retrieval, because I have absolutely no recollection of who it can have been...
But my real shock, I'm afraid, came when I had finished the book and read on through the author's page, whereupon it became rapidly obvious that what I had in my hands was not just an uncomfortably intrusive romance with a man who had actually existed, but an openly admitted self-insert fanfic for the TV show "The Terror", with the protagonist with whom Gore falls in love being very clearly based on the writer herself, her complex background not a case of literary invention but simply autobiography. It's one of those cases where it would have been very much better not to have known anything about the background to the book; she was basically an Arctic history fan who became obsessed with one of the people she was researching and wrote a fantasy (originally only meant to be shared with a small group of friends) in which she comes up with an excuse to bring him to the present day so that he can have hot sex with her. Real Person Fic isn't something I've ever been comfortable with (and there is, I feel, a distinct even if intangible difference between that and writing a historical novel in which your characters are interacting with known figures from history, like Rosemary Hawley Jarman's "We Speak No Treason", or even where your first-person protagonist *is* a real historical figure, as in Philippa Gregory's "The White Queen").
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!)
no subject
Date: 2024-06-20 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-22 12:19 am (UTC)It's a good cross-culture romance, because that's what the author wanted to explore. It's a rather cursory spy thriller, because that was just an excuse to create the desired scenarios in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-11 11:37 am (UTC)And then she made an active decision to develop the idea of the experimental subjects being 'refugees' in time, and chose to draw on her own family background because that was the material she had available in terms of displaced persons. So there was at least a reasoned literary rationale behind it rather than pure self-indulgence (and, though she doesn't say so, the idea that her heroine's Cambodian facial structure reminds Commander Gore of the Eskimos with whom he has been dealing -- this being his only point of reference -- makes for an interesting parallel).