That feeling when your historical crush suddenly emerges from a time machine and you’re assigned to help him integrate into modern society. I mean, who amongst us hasn’t been there, right?
This book by Kaliane Bradley is another one that I picked up partly because it was on everyone’s list of their best books of the year and also because one of my book clubs elected to discuss it.
It’s a really quick read. It took me about a week to get through it, and I read the last third or so in one sitting because that’s about the time it got to the exciting conclusion and I had to find out what happened next.
The book isn’t very well written, but it’s not bad either. I definitely stayed up past my bedtime finishing it, and making me do that is easier said than done.
At the same time, I feel like there were parts earlier in this book that kind of dragged.
It’s told from the perspective of an English-Cambodian woman whose mother is a Cambodian refugee and father is an Englishman. She lives in London and works for the British government as a translator. When she sees a job opening she’s qualified for, and that pays much more than she’s currently earning, she applies, even though she’s not told until after she gets the job what it is, or even what it entails.
She goes through several rounds of interviews, and when she gets the job, she finds herself face to face with someone she’s studied since her preteen years: Commander Graham Gore of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
The new project the MC unwittingly signed herself up for took five different people from five different timelines. Each person who was kidnapped was someone who would have died anyway, so the assumption is taking them from their timeline won’t affect their time period.
Whether it will affect our time period — or whether our time period will affect them — is the question this experiment is trying to answer.
The MC (who’s never named), is remarkably OK with the fact that her employer is kidnapping people, taking them from the only home they’ve ever known, and then just sitting back to see what happens to them. If they die, it’s not a tragedy. It’s a data point.
They rationalize it by telling themselves the people were going to die in their own time anyway, but they act as though that means the mental and emotional trauma they’re inflicting on them by bringing them to an entirely new time in which so much has changed socially and culturally doesn’t matter.
And, of course, there’s the fact that, officially, the Ministry doesn’t even call these people by their names: they call them by the year they were pulled from. So Gore goes by “1847” or “47” for short. There’s a gay man who was pulled from the front lines of WWI in 1916, so they call him “16” and I can’t remember what the others were called. Two were pulled from the French Revolution and one was pulled from the 1600s right after her whole family had died of the plague, but before she succumbed. Her actual name is Margaret and she’s a lesbian and she’s my favorite. She takes to the 21st century like a fish to water. She loses no time in updating her clothing and she sets up online dating profiles for herself as soon as she gets a smartphone.
Gore, I had a harder time with. It’s clear from very early on that the MC has a crush on him, but it’s not clear why. He’s very distant and reserved, to the point where I actually assumed for a long time that he was gay and the relationship between them was doomed before it ever began.
Turns out, Gore is not gay, and he is attracted to the MC, he just has very different ways of showing affection to a woman he wants to “court” because the last time he interacted with a woman was in the very early days of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Even after they get together, the MC seems to feel guilty about the way she threw herself at Gore and expected him to change to meet her expectations of heterosexual romance, while she did nothing to conform to his expectations. That’s a fair point, but she never does anything to remedy the situation.
So, while the romance between the two very different characters is sometimes offered up as an excuse for calling this book “a romance,” I would not call it that.
I would call it a political thriller, because the part where I couldn’t put this book down was when it became clear that the MC’s employer did not always have her or Gore’s best interests at heart.
Things start to get weird when one of the higher-ups at the Ministry disappeared without any explanation. His phone would ring through, emails to him went unanswered, but there was no one picking up the slack, and the Ministry never redirected any of that correspondence to another agent. There was just a void where he had been.
Then he was killed while standing right next to the MC at a public event, then Gore and the MC were held at not-gunpoint by time travelers from the future with a weapon that was not a gun, but was definitely deadly.
And that’s when things escalated.
I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say I had a hard time believing one person could change so drastically. I know 20 years is a lot, and I know there was an alternate timeline, but at some point there should be some similarities between two people, and I just didn’t see any, and that made it hard for me to believe that part of the ending.