The Ministry of Time
The Ministry of Time
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Kaliane Bradley on The Ministry of Time
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A fan wiki, a daguerreotype, and a clickThe book began not with a concept but with a photograph. Bradley was watching AMC’s The Terror, a dramatization of the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition, and losing track of the cast. She pulled up a fan wiki, found the name Graham Gore at the bottom of the first episode’s page, and followed the link to his Wikipedia entry. What she found there was a daguerreotype and a shipmate’s pen portrait describing a man of ‘great stability of character’ and ‘the sweetest of tempers.’ The fixation that followed produced, first, a series of vignettes written as gifts for online friends in the polar-exploration community, then, eventually, a novel.
When I first ran across the real historical figure Graham Gore — a man about whom there is very little archival material — I could actually hear the ‘click’ of my fixation falling into place, or maybe that was just my poor brain finally breaking.
Running alongside the Gore project was a much heavier attempt: a novel about the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, and the British-Cambodian diaspora. Bradley had been trying to write it for years. It wasn’t the subject that defeated her; it was the posture she brought to it. The sense of obligation produced prose she describes as miserable rather than alive.
No good writing comes out of the sense of duty of telling yourself, ‘Well, I have to do this because this is the only thing I should be doing and it’s the only thing I have any right to talk about.’ That novel just didn’t work. It was a miserable experience.
Her polar-exploration friends eventually pointed out that she was already writing the novel she needed to write. The Ministry of Time became the British-Cambodian novel the dutiful project never could.
As the vignettes grew into a manuscript, Bradley kept encountering a discomfort she couldn’t dissolve: she was a person whose heritage included countries colonized by European powers, and she was genuinely, romantically drawn to the story of a British imperial expedition. Working out how to hold that without resolving it prematurely became part of the book’s engine.
...if you come from a country, or you have heritage, your family comes from a country that was colonized by one of the European powers, there is a very kind of complex sense of, how do I relate to these men, because I find them almost romantic in this tragedy and this stupidity
That unresolved friction pushed the novel into more uncomfortable territory than a straightforward romance would have required, and is why the book’s love story cannot be separated from its politics.
How she wrote it
Nine drafts, no time travel on the pageThe first draft took about twelve weeks and was written in second person, with the narrator functioning as a transparent stand-in for the friends who were reading each instalment. By the time the book reached publication it was draft nine. The single most consequential structural decision in that revision process was one of pure subtraction.
It is a time travel novel in which no time travel happens on the page. It all takes place in the 21st century because the narrator is experiencing it in the 21st century in linear time.
Her editors pressed on what the stakes could be if characters were simply able to rewind and correct mistakes. Her answer was to establish strict limits on the technology, which shifted the weight of the novel onto the choices people make rather than the mechanism that transports them.
Choosing which historical figures, the book’s ‘expats’ plucked from the past and relocated to twenty-first-century London, to include followed specific logic. Gore was selected partly because his obscurity served the plot: as a footnote in the Franklin record, his removal from 1847 would go unnoticed by history. The narrator, a civil servant assigned as his ‘bridge’ or live-in handler, has no name of her own, and that namelessness was structural rather than coy.
There’s a kind of hierarchy of naming in the book. Because the bridge narrates most of the book, she doesn’t need to name herself to herself. As far as she’s concerned, she’s the center of the universe.
The expats receive full names because the narrator surveils them obsessively. Her handler, her colleague, and the vice-secretary get first names only. She misreads all three, and those misreadings drive some of the book’s worst decisions.
The Franklin expedition chapters, narrated in third person from Gore’s point of view in the Arctic and interspersed through the present-day story, were not part of the early drafts. They arrived during revision as a solution to an information problem: readers needed to see what the narrator cannot.
You can use humor to convey difficult ideas that might otherwise be hard to confront or digest or bring into your heart. So I think humor can slide ideas under the door. [paraphrased from audio]
Bradley’s favorite writer is Terry Pratchett, and she cites his argument that the opposite of funny is not serious as a working principle. The comedy in the book is a delivery mechanism, not a relief valve.
The manuscript was written in the evenings, after full days as an editor at Penguin Classics, in a small room with the phone elsewhere and no internet open. When it was ready to go out, Bradley submitted it to agents under a pseudonym. The decision was partly practical, to spare her industry contacts any awkwardness, and partly, as she described it to the Guardian, a ‘masochistic’ test of whether the work could stand without her name attached to it.
Only write the fun parts. This is also now the main advice I give to other people.
The personal thread
The slow-moving crisis underneath the premiseBradley believes she is the first British-Cambodian person to publish a novel in the UK. Her narrator shares her heritage, and the book’s preoccupations with displacement and assimilation are ones she has been working through her entire life, not just for this project. The label she uses to describe herself in public has never sat comfortably.
I am in a constant state of slow-moving crisis about the term, for example, British-Cambodian writer. What does that mean for me? Does that mean, does the British-Cambodian come first? Does the writer come first? Do I always have to modify them?
That personal instability around identity is not just biographical texture. It is the condition from which the novel’s central metaphor was built. The expats pulled from the past and resettled in the present are, in Bradley’s own account, a structural image drawn from displacement she knows from her family’s history.
It’s the equivalent of being plucked out of the 19th century and being told you have to assimilate, you have to have these values, you have to be productive for the society. Being told: ‘Now you’re here, this is who you have to be.’
On what the book is wrestling with
Whom institutions ask to carry extra weightThe Ministry of the title is a British government department running the expat program, and Bradley designed it to behave the way real institutions behave. The ‘expats,’ a term the Ministry applies instead of ‘refugees,’ are not equals inside the program, and the inequity maps onto recognizable contemporary dynamics. The vocabulary is a political argument built into the book’s grammar.
The two BIPOC bridges get a raw deal because, in addition to being bridges, they’re also supposed to be representational, in a way the white bridges don’t have to be.
Bradley calls this ‘a tasty bit of racism about the perceived non-existence of people of colour in historical Britain.’ The institutional diversity logic she is describing treats people of colour as evidence of inclusion rather than as individuals with the same opacity and privacy available to their white counterparts.
The book’s skepticism about time travel as a corrective tool is not incidental. It is the novel’s answer to a temptation the premise deliberately raises. Characters who try to use the technology to fix outcomes do not find it going well for them. Bradley has said this was a deliberate limit, and the reason is not mechanical but moral.
I was reluctant to give time-travel too much power in the book, because it’s the choices people make and the responsibilities they are willing to shoulder that will make a serious difference to our future.
The open ending follows from the same logic. Bradley has said she wanted it to signal that the future remains changeable rather than to dodge a resolution she hadn’t worked out.
The Franklin expedition, which sent men into the Arctic without consulting the Inuit populations who already knew the territory, gave Bradley a case study in imperial logic she could examine from inside a love story. Writing Gore as a sincere believer in the British Empire required her to stay honest about what that belief cost other people, and what it still costs the narrator.
The development of the storyline very much came from having to confront what it would actually be like to live with a British imperialist who sincerely believed in the British Empire.
What she wants us to sit with
History as a thing governments controlBradley has been explicit that her interest in time travel was never really about the technology. The premise interested her because of what it revealed about the way governments use history: who gets to shape the national narrative, and what happens to people who are inconvenient to it. The Ministry in the book controls the past not because it can change events but because it decides which events are remembered and how.
I wasn’t all that interested in time-travel qua time-travel — I was more curious about the notion of history as a narrative which informs national and cultural identity, the ways that might be manipulated by a government who literally controls the narrative.
The book’s comedy and its political argument are not in tension with each other. Bradley treats humor as the most efficient tool available for getting a difficult idea past a reader’s defenses, and she has grounded that belief in Pratchett’s writing on the subject for years. The Waterstones interview gave her the chance to say what that principle looks like in practice.
You can use humor to convey difficult ideas that might otherwise be hard to confront or digest or bring into your heart. So I think humor can slide ideas under the door. [paraphrased from audio]