Here’s the premise.
‘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.’
Our narrator, a nameless civil servant, works as a ‘bridge’ for the ministry. It’s her job to be a liaison officer for her assigned expat, Commander Graham Gore who is known as '1847', the year he came from.
According to history, Gore died on a doomed arctic expedition but having been brought to the present day, the ‘bridge’ is tasked with monitoring and assisting his transition into contemporary life.
What follows is an intelligent and deeply enjoyable sci-fi thriller/love story and the most innovative novel I’ve read in ages.
The debut of the British-Cambodian author, Kaliane Bradley, it has already been commissioned for a BBC series adapted by Alice Birch who worked on Normal People - very promising news.
Having a genius idea is one thing, realising it is another and Bradley just about does it. Her writing is lyrical and often very funny and she has a light touch when handling the time travel stuff.
She doesn’t labour the point about the strangeness modern life or spend too much time on gimmicky scenes where the bridge explains technological and social developments to Gore.
Having said that, the few throwaway concessions to the incongruous meeting of past and present are extremely fun:
Gore wouldn’t watch television. He seemed to find it a tasteless invention.
‘You can send dioramas through the ether,’ he said. ‘and you’ve used it to show people at their most wretched.’
‘No one’s forcing you to watch Eastenders.’
On some levels, the story works as a meditation on dislocation and what it means to assimilate. The narrator, British-Cambodian like Bradley, shares insights into her own feelings about being othered, belonging and generational trauma but again, this is all really lightly done. It doesn’t feel like a strident polemic or overtly issue-driven.
The framework of the novel is the resettlement programme run by the ministry - tests, education, covert surveillance and there’s plenty of shady ministry behaviour to create conflict within the story. But the best stuff is watching how their relationship develops inside the banal domesticity of the life they share - cooking each other dinner, late night chats, bike rides to Hampstead Heath.
It has all the hallmarks of a great romance novel. Crackling chemistry, snappy rapport, lingering looks.
“In deference to the weather, he had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and the erotic charge of his bare forearms was giving me a headache.”
Swoon.
I have some reservations, especially about the ending of the novel, but that’s a conversation for after it’s been published (16th May).
It’s often hard to know what will really cut through when the PR hype machine names every new release as the book of the century but this one feels like it deserves the attention.
You can pre-order a copy here.
See you next time!
Hannah