The Ministry of Time

Reading Group Guide

The Ministry of Time

Kaliane Bradley

In near-future Britain, a narrator known as “the bridge” takes a government job that she knows little about, save that it pays well, only to find herself at the heart of a top-secret project. Hired by a newly founded ministry devoted to experimenting with time-travel, she is assigned to be a “bridge,” a monitor and guide, for Commander Graham Gore, one of five “expats” who have been pulled from the past to the present. Gore, a nineteenth-century naval officer plucked from the throes of the doomed Franklin Expedition, lives with the bridge in London and participates with the other expats in exercises that are intended to acclimate them to the present, while being monitored for signs of physical, mental, or dimensional deterioration. But as the bridge grows closer to Gore, it gradually becomes clear that all is not what it seems, and the government can’t (and won’t) be willing to protect everyone.

At the beginning of the book, you present time-travel as a relatively inexplicable phenomenon, saying that “the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit.” Why did you feel it necessary to introduce this concept, so central to the plot of the book, in such a direct and even comic manner?

Time-travel is such a weighted trope. When you write about time-travel, you’re not just writing about time-time travel; you’re writing your own outline for the shape of the universe. Do you subscribe to Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” theory of history, or does history come from below, from the people? Is time a series of linear events, expanding into unfixed futures; or is “time” complete and whole, regardless of the human perception? Does time-travel always have to draw on our (rich and varied) hard sci-fi tradition, especially if the author has barely a gnat’s grasp on quantum physics?

Well, what I wanted to do was write about this one sexy polar explorer. So I shut all those questions down ASAP.

I’m joking. The book is told from the point of view of a woman for whom these questions are so many ontological fart noises; it would have rung false for her to try and explain the fictional physics. She perceives history as a human subject, so she flags early on that what she’s telling is not a conceptual story, but a human one.

You and your unnamed narrator share an ethnicity—mixed white British and Cambodian. Were you ever concerned that she might be read as an author proxy?

All the time. This is a problem shared by anyone with a marginalized identity who is writing first person narration.

In the first versions of the book, the bridge wasn’t British-Cambodian. She wasn’t anything, really. She was a cipher. I knew I wanted her to be mixed-race and white-passing, but I dithered over making her British-Indian or British-Burmese—from a country colonized by the UK rather than France, which I thought would make more sense in a story about Britain’s imperial legacy. But it was just so weird and disingenuous for me to do that. I had a specific set of references and a specific experience of being white-passing that I could draw on. Of course I was worried that I’d be accused of writing a self-hating self-[insert here], but if I worried about the judgement of strangers then I’d never write anything.

I ended up taking this bridge out of another book I was drafting, which was about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian diaspora in the UK, because I felt the character in that book shared a number of concerns I developed in this bridge. I hope she reads as someone that anyone—not just an author who shares her ethnicity—could become, including her ability to change her mind.

How did your own relationship with the characters develop as you wrote this book?

One of the challenges I faced when I was writing was that I had the bridge’s perspective over my head, cutting off my sightline like a medieval torture device. The bridge is attracted to Graham and Maggie (though she attempts to suppress it), so I got to flood the page with observations about them; but (for example) she consigns Adela to the scary boss stereotype, which means that this complex, compromised, deeply lonely woman walks around the novel in a ridiculous eye patch, saying camply sinister stuff, as if she’s in a totally different genre to everyone else. It would have rung false for the bridge to be interested in and empathetically observant of everyone, to interact with everyone with the profundity with which she interacts with Graham, but I missed the characters whose edges were cut off because of the narrowness of her vision. Crucially, however, the bridge recognizes this too, by the end.

I found this necessary narrowness the most difficult with Arthur. I missed him too much. In the end I solved this by writing a long short story from Arthur’s point of view, about his holiday in Scotland with Graham. I felt a bit better after that.

The issue of “hereness” and “thereness” is a recurring one that is first presented when Anne Spencer is being rejected by the twenty-first century. How did you develop the concept of “hereness” and “thereness?”

Many years before I knew about Commander Gore, I read an extraordinary book, Time Lived, Without Its Flow by poet and philosopher Denise Riley. It was written after the death of Riley’s son, though it isn’t about the death of her son qua death. Instead, it’s a wrenchingly lucid and considered essay about the temporal and mental experience of grief. Riley describes the sense of being pulled out of time by her grief—time is arrested—and the difficulty of writing when writing must anticipate a future, must even anticipate the end of a sentence; and she simply can’t, living always in the single frozen space of grief. Time Lived Without Its Flow had a lasting effect on me, because it meticulously unpetalled a sense I’d always had a flowery, vague feel about, viz, our internal time (where memory, anticipation, and sensation overlap to form personal experience) was hooked by habit onto linear time, and major emotional disruption can uncouple us. We are there, we aren’t here.

I also thought about the act of storytelling, specifically the family stories I’ve inherited about pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. That version of Cambodia exists for my family as another country—no longer physically accessible but nevertheless vividly present. We’re always telling stories about that place, over there. It has its own colors and textures. It even has its own cuisine, as my mother insists that no one cooks Cambodian food correctly “anymore.” So even though it isn’t “here,” my mother’s Cambodian is always just “there.”

Could you share a little bit about your choice to incorporate Rogue Male into this story?

I read Rogue Male many years ago when I was going through an unsettled time. I had the same feeling about the unnamed narrator of the book as I did ten years later, reading Graham Gore’s Wikipedia page during the UK lockdown: Wow, this person seems very capable and calm, I bet they’d handle this situation well. But, of course, at the end of Rogue Male, the narrator reveals a surprising, emotional, unrational facet of himself and completely recasts his motivations, unsettling his whole narration—just as Gore does. Rogue Male is a thriller that turns out to be a love story, and that inspired me when I was writing The Ministry of Time.

There is also a lovely cat in Rogue Male, who likes bully beef. The narrator is very fond of this little cat. You see where I’m going with this.

While this book tackles many serious issues, including climate change and imperialism, it is outrageously funny. How did you manage to balance humor and criticism?

The real question is, how do I stop doing this. A lot of the earliest edits made to The Ministry of Time, by my agent Chris Wellbelove and his assistant Emily Fish, were taking out crap jokes that were only funny to me. I’m locked in a time-loop of wretched chuckles. Help!

On a more serious note, levity and playfulness are examples of tools you can give a reader for tackling difficult subjects, or even unfamiliar ones they feel awkward about approaching. As Terry Pratchett has pointed out, funny is not the opposite of serious; the opposite of funny is not funny and the opposite of serious is not serious. There are many tools you might use—I think anger is a powerful architect of text—but in my case my preferred tool is humor. Nothing is funny unless it touches the quick in some way—laughter being an instinctive, primal gut reaction—so when we’re talking about the things that make us laugh, we are often talking about the things we hold as immediate and personal.

Why did you choose to include passages set during the Franklin Expedition, rather than simply letting the bridge narrate the entire story?

The first version of The Ministry of Time was written for friends who were familiar with the Franklin Expedition (although most of them were not as familiar as I became with Graham Gore). As a result, there was a subtext—about British colonialism, about the incursion on Inuit homelands, about the emotional life of the expedition itself—that they brought with their reading. In short, they didn’t need the historical sections to know where Graham was coming from.

Around rewrite two or three, my friend Anne read the novel. Anne was not at all familiar with the Franklin Expedition, which meant that the context around Graham was missing and not all of his motives were legible. It was important to me that these were legible, partly because I think the Franklin Expedition is fascinating, but also because The Ministry of Time is also a book about trauma and its aftermath. Traumatized people don’t always react to situations that recall their trauma in logical ways, and they are sometimes trying to tell themselves a story (in Graham’s case, about personal redemption) about how things should or might go. I developed the Franklin Expedition sections bearing this in mind; even if his personal journey is misunderstood by the bridge, I wanted it to be there for the reader.

There’s no evidence that the historical figure Graham Gore killed anyone in Nunavut, by the way! That is purely fictional. Sorry Graham.

What inspired the chicken bag, and do you have a chicken bag yourself?

I really like chickens. I share Albert Uderzo’s opinion that chickens are intrinsically funny. I once saw the exact chicken bag described by the bridge on Etsy and I’ve never been able to stop thinking about it. It had such a winsome little felt face.