Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“The Ministry of Time”
By: Kaliane Bradley
Narrated By: George Weightman, Katie Leung
Kaliane Bradley (Author)
Kaliane Bradley imaginatively writes about the social complications that arise if time travel were found possible in the 21st century. The main characters are an unnamed narrator and a 19th century British Commander named Graham Gore. A key to understanding “The Ministry of Time” is that the narrator is unnamed.
At times, “The Ministry of Time” is difficult to understand because of a perspective that mystifies listener/readers who are not raised in a British culture. However, on balance, comedy, tragedy, romance, and history are universal experiences that pull one into Bradley’s imaginative story.
The story begins with the final interview of a person who is hired by “The Ministry of Time” to become a councilor to one of several characters drawn out of time into the 21st century.
This interviewee is a Cambodian born British citizen. The choice of the person’s birth country is clever for several reasons. One, the interviewee, her mother, and grandfather are born in a country that experienced the killing fields of Cambodia’s Pol Pot. Two, the interviewee is an attractive non-white woman who knows what it is like to work in a country largely controlled by white men. And three, she represents a libertine western world’ lifestyle.
The main character of the story, the interviewee, is to become one of several councilors to stay with individuals who are rescued from assured death in past centuries.
There is a limit to the number of people that can be rescued because of the design of the time-travel’ portal. That limit generates an interest in a time traveler who wishes to control who can use the portal. A surprise is to find who that time traveler is and why he/she is determined to control its use.
The social implications of time travel are revealed in Bradley’s clever, adventurous, sometimes humorous, and apocryphal story.
Along the way, reader/listeners are exposed to the complexity of human beings, the historic recurrence of discrimination, the consequence of despoilation of the world’s environment, and the power of attraction that leads to love, and sometimes tragedy.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 