The Ministry of Why?

We Read the Ministry of Time So You Don’t Have to)

 The non-literate future and you…

 After reading The Ministry of Time I'd assume the titular ministry is the place I would go to get my time back, if only I could. Fortunately, it's not a lot of time to be sure. If one thing about this novel recommends itself, its length and brisk pace. After that… well, if I'm going to start reading AMC's The Terror slash fiction that takes a midway turn into wincingly cringe soft porn before slinking off into the author's own solipsistic banality, I'd just find a reddit page for that… there is not much to say. Not every book is for everybody. The Illiterate said a friend recommended it to him, so he picked it, and you can go over to his review to see how that went.

 The problem is the author, Kaliane Bradley, really wanted to make it about her, and she's not all that interesting. She could be. Her family came from Cambodia, her mother survived the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields, and she's been lunching out on that, without trying to seem like she is, for a bit. Fifteen years ago, this would be on a niche website, like this one, and the author's five best friends and some really weird people who are chronically aroused by Jared Harris and Ciraín Hinds in British Naval costumes would be the only people who read this. Which is not to say, there's no place for that. The fanfiction/slash fiction thing has been going on since old Trekkies realized they could just make up their own adventures. And for the hardcore fan like them, there was never enough content (especially if what you really wanted was for Kirk and Spock, or Picard and Ryker to graphically hook-up.) But Ministry? You wouldn't even bookmark the site.

Ms. Bradley doesn’t so much have characters (excepting herself) as she has well-worn modern pieties embodied in semi human form. This in itself is nothing new. Wrapping entire ideas or symbols in characters is nothing new in literature. Except here the ideas don’t much advance the story beyond the author being able to signal to her intended audience, that she is in fact one of the good ones. Whatever ideas one might have to actually grapple with if you were ripping people from the past into the near future are never really explored. Instead, we get Arthur, the sad-eyed gentle boy torn apart by war is a character late 90’s coming out episode of One Tree Hill. Ann Spenser, a woman brought out of the French Revolution, doesn’t even have a personality. She’s merely in the story to glitch out and quite literally ghost us. (Maybe she was as bored of near future England as I was, but unlike me had the option to simply stop existing.)

 Which brings us to the whale boat slash fiction, Graham Gore, the male lead, and the narrator’s awkward romantic interest, who, is basically an upper-middle class English bloke who maybe voted for Boris Johnson, but definitely not Brexit. And I do mean awkward romantic interest. About two thirds of the way into this, Ms. Bradley tries channeling her inner Jean Auel and crunches out two or three cringe-inducing sex scenes. What I assume is supposed to be titillating, or as the kids say these days, Spicey, instead made me want to look away out of embarrassment for everyone involved. What made it worse is it just sort of popped up, and then blipped out. Like an afterthought. The market calls for what the Book-Tok kids call “spicey” content, so we threw some in there. The worst part of this, is Gore is maybe the closest we have to a fleshed-out character who approaches the modern world unabashedly from the past. Ms. Bradley gets closest to being interesting when she wrestles with that friction. Sadly, she mostly dodges, often having her narrator lamely explain that of course Gore is wrong, and we move on.

 Typically, I would read something like this, throw it out a window, and move on. But I am told I am a blogger now and have responsibilities as such. I also thought this was a good moment to scratch an itch on a pet theory of mine. (Or not mine. I’m sure I’ve ran into discussion of this along the way and adopted it as my own. But I am also lazy, not getting paid for this, and too tired to do research.) The pet theory in question, is that we’re moving into a post literate society. Not illiterate, that’s different (but I would not be surprised to find out literacy is declining as well,) maybe more like unread. Men, even if they do read, don’t read fiction anymore. No one reads the classics, or even agrees on what those are. University MFA grads have infested the publishing industry, which to be fair, no one else is striving to get into that dying industry, and as a result we get the same MFA freshman creative writing seminar tone and voice through everything. These weren’t the kids raised on Greek and Latin, Cervantes, Thackery, Wilde, Dickens, Wollstonecraft, Plath… I could go on. It was all Harry Potter and YA vampires* Which is not to say the past is eternally better. For sure, the 1990’s were the pinnacle of human civilization, but the band plays on, talent is out there, good stuff still filters through. But it feels like less. The literary past is indeed past. People still write, we still read, we’re just not read, (Well you’re not. I am.)

*Your correspondent thoroughly enjoyed the Potter novels.