The Ministry of Time

The unnamed narrator interviews for a top-secret, lucrative position within an arm of the British government called the Ministry. For her sixth round of interviews, she meets with Vice Secretary of Expatriation Adela, a woman with straw-like hair and an eye patch. The narrator knows only that the job involves working with important refugees, so it doesn’t surprise her when Adela asks about her mother’s experience as a Cambodian refugee who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide. When she gets the job, the narrator learns that the Ministry has access to time travel, and she’ll be working with “expats” from history. She’ll be monitoring one closely over the next year as part of a project to study the effects of time travel on expats’ bodies and minds. In this role, she’s called a “bridge.”

The narrator is assigned to the expat Commander Graham Gore of the Royal Navy, born in 1809 and purported to have died in 1847. He and the narrator move into a small home provided by the Ministry. As he experiences modern life, Gore is overwhelmed by how much life has changed but accepts it all with a sense of humor. He’s impressed by planes, surprised by changed gender norms, and horrified to learn about germs. The most shocking revelation is that his expedition to the Arctic was lost and that all 126 men on the voyage perished in 1848. The expedition’s two ships were stuck in Arctic ice, and Graham left to hunt for food. The last things he remembers are a flash of lightning and a doorway of blue light, which he now understands was his extraction by the Ministry.

Restrained by Ministry rules from going out in public for a set period, Graham occupies himself by reading, learning about the modern era, and listening to music on Spotify. In addition, he learns a bit about the four other expats who are part of the project, referred to by the year from which they were extracted. Sixteen-forty-five is a man extracted from the Battle of Naseby. Sixteen-sixty-five is a woman pulled from the Great Plague of London. Seventeen-ninety-three is a woman “from Robespierre’s Paris” with “quite the psych profile” (18). Nineteen-sixteen is an army captain extracted from the Battle of Somme in World War I. The Ministry refers to Graham as Eighteen-forty-seven.

In 1847, Gore returns to his ship after a day of hunting and learns that Captain Fitzjames has convened an emergency command meeting. The crew has discovered that many of their tinned rations are rotten. Gore reports that he hunted for four and a half hours but caught little and found no tracks or other signs of large game. Their ships have been stuck in the ice for two years. They won’t survive a third winter unless they reduce rations, so those who are already sick probably won’t make it.

Graham and the narrator meet with Quentin, the narrator’s handler at the Ministry. Quentin expresses concern about cognitive impairment, reporting that the Wellness team told Graham about the fate of his expedition several times. He says that Arthur Reginald-Smyth, or Nineteen-sixteen, keeps thinking he’s still in the war and expecting to be sent back to the front. Graham meets the other expats and gets along well with Arthur. Arthur and his bridge, Simellia, plan to take Graham to a bar. Graham invites the narrator to join them. She meets with Simellia, who previously worked in the Ministry’s Behavioral Science department, to discuss the plan.

The narrator opts not to go to the bar to avoid overwhelming war-traumatized Arthur. She and Graham have drinks together after he returns, and she tries to explain contemporary views on racism and structural barriers to equality. Graham says he served on the Preventative Squadron in his time, which was set up to suppress West African human trafficking. However, he now feels that his level of compassion at the time was inadequate. In addition, he notes the narrator’s multiethnic heritage, which she typically avoids proclaiming.

The Ministry’s Wellness team begins running weekly experiments to assess the expats’ adjustment to contemporary views and language use. Bridges watch through a two-way mirror as the expats are shown modern-day images and asked to describe what they see. The bridges are expected to help the expats assimilate by later correcting any anachronisms, malapropisms, and other forms of ignorance. Meanwhile, Graham becomes bored because he feels he has no purpose. While he undergoes a routine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedure at the Ministry, the narrator meets a uniformed officer she subsequently refers to as “the Brigadier” based on his rank. She immediately dislikes him and later notes his odd use of outdated references.

Over time, the narrator’s feelings for Graham develop into romantic attraction. One day she introduces him to marijuana. They smoke a joint together and end up in giggling fits, during which Graham decides he wants a dog and tells the narrator to call him by his first name because he hopes they’re friends. He also asks her about a strange object he saw at the Ministry. He describes it as a handheld machine that projects a grid with information on it. He shows her a sketch he drew of it, but she has no idea what the object is.