To review this absolutely delightful and slightly bonkers collision of romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, and spy thriller genres I must digress. Bear with me.
Historical fiction is an exercise in imaginative empathy. My favorites in the realist version of this genre—like Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its sequels—collapse the distance to the “other country” of the past by immersing us in the minds of people whose alien understanding of the world nevertheless features deeply recognizable and universal humanity.
But recently, I’ve come across a new (to me) take on historical fiction—one that is less about putting ourselves into the mindset of those who came before and more about interrogating the past by yanking its residents to our modern world and demanding they account for themselves. In the Norwegian TV show Beforeigners—the title pun is <chef’s kiss>—a mysterious force pulls people from the 1800s and the Viking age into the 21st century. The show is mostly a sci-fi-inflected police procedural, but what’s most fascinating is its study of how contemporary progressive Norway grapples with representatives of its violent, imperialist, and religiously repressive past, whose views are often repulsive but who cannot easily be othered and dismissed. It’s a great show—I know we don’t review TV on bookclique, but I recommend it!
Kaliane Bradley’s novel, The Ministry of Time, has a similar premise: sometime in the near future, time travel is invented, and for reasons of safety and not wanting to muck about with history, the UK intelligence services (aka government spies) decide to bring people from the past into the present. Borrowing from Ray Bradbury’s story, “A Sound of Thunder,” they take only those destined to die soon in their original timelines, which yields a woman from the early 17th century plague years; a man from the trenches of WWI; and most prominently, Commander Graham Gore—a real-life figure from the doomed 1840s Franklin expedition to the Arctic. To ease acclimation, each time traveler is assigned a year-long handler—in theory, part interpreter, part detached observer.
Here, the novel zags from sci-fi to romance and thriller. Gore’s handler is our unnamed first-person narrator, a young woman who has Cambodian heritage but passes for white. Per orders, the two share a small apartment, which becomes the site of simmering sexual tension and angrily flirty arguments about modernity. However, underlying everything is the fact of Gore’s participation in England’s imperialist and enslaving past and the narrator’s sharp memories of her parents barely escaping the Khmer Rouge genocide—and her muted grievance about the colonial history of south-east Asia in general. But still, Gore’s self-repression and precise competence are extremely hot, making him wanted both by the narrator and by the government that now hopes to rope him into the spy game.
From here, the novel spins wildly into many different directions, veering from genre to genre, from plot twist to plot twist, in a way that is somehow both delightfully frothy and deeply poignant. The mysteries build, the love story explodes, and time travel is ever surprising.
