It started as a bit of fun to entertain friends during one of Britain’s endless, unnerving lockdowns but Kaliane Bradley ended up with a debut novel. And what a debut. The Ministry of Time is a cracking time-travel story, a tender romance, a shrewd workplace comedy and a mystery with a couple of great twists – all delicately threaded with curly issues such as identity politics and climate change.
Writers like Mark Haddon, Francis Spufford and Eleanor Catton are shouting its praises. Catton called it “outrageously brilliant”. And even before it was published, it was snapped up to be made into a series for the BBC.
So how did she do it? Bradley notes that it’s not the first novel she has written, just the first one she has had published. “I’ve only ever gone out looking for literary agent representation for one novel before this, but that went nowhere,” she says with a laugh, which she does often during our video interview. “It was a terrible book. I’m glad it went nowhere.”
The version of the published book is, she thinks, the ninth draft, having passed under the discerning eyes of editors and her agent. They helped her with the storytelling, to align characters, and to trim her often-arresting metaphors and similes. “I over-salt my food,” she says.
Bradley has won several awards for stories, including the 2022 VS Pritchett Short Story Prize for Doggerland. Overnight successes are seldom overnight. “Also, I’m not, like, a 22-year-old debut.” She is 35.
She thinks perhaps the reason The Ministry of Time has had such positive early attention is people found something to connect with. “I hope that some of that sense of joy comes across rather than being a very difficult, heavy, worthy novel, which I have also tried to do before.”
The plot is this: in a near-future London assailed by floods and heat blasts, time travel exists, notes Adela, the head of a new British government ministry, “like someone describing the coffee machine”. Five “expats” are successfully brought back from certain periods in the past, and assigned minders, or “bridges”.
There is a woman from 1665, plucked from the Great Plague of London, a lieutenant from 1645, an army captain from 1916, and a woman from 1793, Robespierre’s Paris. The narrator, a language expert who’s not entirely sure why she has the job, is bridge to Graham Gore, 37, a real-life officer in the Royal Navy who lived in the first half of the 19th century, only to perish in the Arctic during an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.
The novel’s Gore is sardonic, brooding, utterly charming: “His eyes were hazel, scrawled faintly with green, and thickly lashed. They were both striking and uncommunicative.” A crack shot and hunter, Gore plays the flute and steadfastly retains many of his era’s views and habits, including smoking cigarettes like it’s a brilliant new fad.
After learning about electricity, plumbing and internal combustion engines, he observes that we have failed to create Icarus-like wings or invisibility, devoting our genius instead to producing household appliances. “You have enslaved the power of lightning, and you’ve used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help.”
He has yet to learn about the Cold War, the War on Terror or sexual liberation. “They had started by telling him about the dismantling of the British Empire and it hadn’t gone down well.”
Bradley, who lives in London and works as a classics editor at Penguin, is British-Cambodian. The narrator, who is unnamed, and notes that people don’t normally pronounce her name correctly anyway (Kaliane, it’s worth mentioning, is pronounced Koll-ee-ann), is also of Cambodian heritage; the mother of Gore’s bridge was a refugee. This permits the novel to make sharp observations about tricky subjects, such as identity politics, with great humour. “You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me … people say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like the late-entering forms of white – Spanish, maybe – and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.”
Silly ideas surface
The novel’s premise surfaced during a 2020 lockdown after Bradley watched The Terror, a series about John Franklin’s 1840s doomed Arctic expedition. “I got very into polar exploration, first of all. I found a group of people online – because at the time that was the only way you could communicate with people – who were also very interested in polar exploration.”
She started “this very silly thing” about what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer lived in your house? British polar expeditions were often run by the Admiralty, she says, the government department responsible for the Royal Navy until 1964.
“Again, that was an enormous imperial project,” she says. “It was about going to other people’s countries and kicking the door in.” Or, as the novel notes: “The Empire regarded the world the way my dad regards the elastic bands that the postman drops on his round: This is handy, it’s just lying here, now it’s mine.”
Introducing people of the past into the present is also a cunning means of highlighting human foibles and hypocrisies, such as eating meat when you’re squeamish about hunting, or modern sexual relations.
“The more I kept writing it, the more I kept imagining what it would be like for the narrator – who was a very different character in the first draft – to relate to someone who is a Victorian from imperial Britain, when it was a very proud thing to be an imperialist, and the aspects of her and her culture and era that feel uncomfortable and the way he might react to them.
“It started as jokes – wouldn’t it be funny if you played a Victorian Kate Bush? Of course, we all live in the real world – he would have had to live in the real world. So it all got out of control.”
The expats are deliberately not told everything. Bradley agrees World War I was probably the first time the planet had seen the slaughter of people on such a massive scale. In fact, the entire 20th century, from the perspective of any other century, probably looks “unbelievably frightening and brutal”, she says.
Writing during a pandemic, she was reminded that people have never before been so globally connected by the internet. “And just watching the whole world shut down and thinking, oh my god, maybe the world will end.” Every era experienced this – World War I, World War II, the Cold War – “people living through the plague did write a lot about how they thought it was the judgment of God,” she says.
She found Gore was living at the end of the era of old-style wooden sailing ships. He was about to become obsolete as the age of steam came in. There was a lot of anxiety in the Royal Navy about Britain’s proud fighting force, she says, and what might happen if everyone was just relying on machines.
The novel features sections written in Gore’s day, as well as those from the various expats. Bradley researched polar expeditions, and Gore in particular. She spends a lot of time reading period fiction in her job.
“I went through a big Dickens obsession over the past couple of years. I was reading so much that you get this kind of echo chamber of vocabulary.” She does think, however, that some of the oldest speech in her novel is slightly misplaced. She was thinking Tudor England, but it is later than that.
The polar passages came about because an editor friend pointed out to her that, unlike her online friends, she knew nothing about the Franklin expedition of which Gore was a part. “She didn’t know what those emotional stakes were supposed to be, why she’s supposed to be interested in Graham Gore, what the great tragedy was there. You can say cannibalism, lost expedition, but those are just words; it’s not building any kind of texture for a character.”
The actual explanation of time travel does get a bit hand-wavy. The narrator says, “I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it.”
Bradley admits with a laugh: “Trying to keep straight in my head the difference between an alternative universe and an alternative timeline was so hard that I sort of wrote my way around it … just didn’t really explain it?”
One of the reasons there’s a speech about time being a limited resource, like all resources, is that one of her editors pointed out that if you could just endlessly do time travel, and have different versions, there aren’t any emotional stakes. “It doesn’t matter if you can keep changing the past.”
Pointed humour
We return to identity politics, how, despite the humour of the novel, there are passages that feel more sharply pointed. “When I was writing this book for fun, I was also working separately on what I thought was going to be The Big Cambodian Novel.” Or a Cambodian diaspora novel, about the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields, and the small British Cambodian diaspora.
“It just didn’t fly. It almost took the purpose out of writing. Writing because you think you ought to be writing, you ought to say something, I don’t think ever really works. It’s not really communicating with the reader, it’s lecturing.”
The bridge does undergo change: “I think by the end of the book she understands that she’s been on a journey that is about understanding the ways that her heritage, inherited trauma and relationship to race and the British state have shaped her as a person. She wants to think of herself as an exception who is not shaped in any way by her identity, her past and her family.”
Romance eventually arrives in the novel, and I say she’s unlikely to be a finalist in the Bad Sex Awards. She laughs in a way that can only be described as a cackle. “I imagined it,” she says. “I would say the very first sex scene is the least changed from the original draft.”
There is also a close, sweet relationship between Gore and another expat called Arthur. Modern eyes tend to place a certain view on such things, but does Bradley think things looked different to people of earlier eras?
“I don’t think it’s always useful to impose our understanding of sexuality and gender on people in the past, partly because we have a different context. It’s not that they felt any less differently than us or, if they’d been born in this era, they would have experienced the way they could live differently.
“Your context shapes who you are and how you can talk about yourself. I think it’s helpful in writing fiction also to be able to imagine characters who coexist and thrive in a particular era and context, and the ways they might have friction with it.”
We’ll get to see these characters in the flesh. Even before the novel was out, US production company A24 (The Zone of Interest) announced it will make a six-part series of The Ministry of Time for the BBC. Alice Birch (Normal People) is writing it.
Bradley is working on a new novel, which, despite the humour in her debut, she keeps thinking needs to be funnier. It remains to be seen, she says, whether she ends up writing something “strained and mad”.
She says it’s a sort of fantasy, partly set in the land of the dead and partly in contemporary London. “Is that not the same thing?” I say without thinking, and she laughs her head off.
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley (Hachette, $37.99), is released out now.
