Time Travel, Passion and Some Very Big Secrets
Kaliane Bradley’s Novel, ‘The Ministry of Time’
When the world feels cold, I turn to books that warm the soul. For me, there’s nothing quite like romance or playfulness with a little edgy quality. Recently, I fell for a novel in the time travel genre that contains all of that and more — Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which was released earlier this year.
Now, I imagine that some of you might be rolling your eyes and thinking: “Do we really need another book about time traveling escapades?” My answer to that is a decided “Yes.”
Maybe you loved The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger; the classic Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or Octavia E. Butler’s acclaimed Kindred. And on the screen, we’ve had a chance to be entertained by versions of those time-travel stories along with Back to the Future, to name a few.
There are some common traits between those stories and Bradley’s tale, to be sure: tapping into a deep human desire to cross the boundaries of time for deeper understanding, to discover what’s been lost or might occur, or to experience deeper love. The whole “shoulda, woulda, coulda” thing is often part of it as well. Yet Ministry puts a lot of that in its backpack and hikes down a different trail.
The book imagines a secretive unit within the U.K. government that has discovered a way to snatch unsuspecting people from past eras and bring them up into the novel’s present time. The extraction process is in the experimental stages. The people who are ripped out of their regular lives were on the verge of death due to world-shattering events like war or pestilence. The ministry reasons that if the time-travel experiment actually works and the people from past eras acclimate to life in current times, their lives have essentially been saved.
The person from the past who’s at the center of the tale actually existed in the Victorian era: Graham Gore, who was part of an Arctic expedition that ended with the death of all 129 officers and crewmen for reasons that are not entirely clear.
Once Graham is saved from death and yanked up into what is (for him) the future, he is paired up with a young woman who essentially acts as a guide and a housemate. She’s known as a Bridge in the ministry’s parlance. We never learn the Bridge’s name, but because her narration takes up the majority of the novel, we come to know her quite well. And gradually, as Graham and his host become closer over the course of the year when they dwell in the same London home, the romantic momentum between them builds. We, the readers, don’t know exactly how far along this relationship is going to go until the last part of the book.
Here’s how Graham is described by the Bridge when she first meets him: “He turned his head to look around the room, and I saw an imposing nose in profile, like a hothouse flower growing out of his face. It was strikingly attractive and strikingly large. He had a kind of resplendent excess of feature that made him look hyperreal.”
Bradley’s Inspiration
Bear in mind that Bradley had very little to go by, in researching what the actual Graham Gore was like. In an interview with The Waterstone podcast, she explained that the book was inspired by a TV series called The Terror, based on a book of the same name, written by Dan Simmons, about the doomed 1845 Arctic expedition that led to the real Graham Gore’s death. Bradley watched the series during the COVID pandemic.
“I went on the Wikipedia page for Graham Gore for a series of quite random reasons. And just immediately, in the way that I fixate on things — and I think we all fixated on things during lockdown — I just thought, ‘My God, this guy seems great.’ His biography makes him seem like a very calm, competent, very kind man. People liked him very much. I really think that picture [on the Wikipedia page] is very attractive. I know not everyone agrees with me, but I’m fighting for his right to be a hottie.”
In Bradley’s imagination, Graham’s dimples emerge whenever he’s amused. And he’s a very witty man. Here’s a description of him a little later in the book: “He wandered off with the expansive air of a man who might pick up some parsley, not because he has been told to but because that might be a jolly thing to do en route to his next footloose and fancy-free destination.”
Bradley has also given strong personalities to some of the other “ex pats,” as the ministry terms to people who have traveled up to the present. Among them is striking woman with a very distinctive way of speaking from the Great Plague of London, and a soldier who was extracted from the Battle of the Somme during World War I — one of the deadliest battles in human history.
The Passion Potion
I have to admit Bradley made me fall in love with Graham. And I know how she did it. It doesn’t just have to do with characteristics I’ve already cited. There’s a trick that writers employ when creating a feeling of deep connection, or love, between characters. A certain character often discovers that another person in the story fills a certain void in their lives or has a void that speaks to their own — something that’s missing in their lives. I’ve certainly used that love potion in my own novels.
For an artist, that might mean finding another person who “gets” their work in a way that no one else has, someone who encourages them to keep going when creative prospects seem bleak. In the case of the Bridge and Graham, it has to do with how they are both essentially out of London society’s mainstream and have undergone difficulties. The Bridge has a Cambodian mother, who came to London as a refugee, and a British father. And the sense of trauma in her family’s past is part of her psyche.
Bradley herself is a British Cambodian woman who knows how tempting it is to present herself as purely Caucasian and bury her family roots, as her character does. And yet, as she explained in The Waterstone interview, “You can’t outrun trauma. If you are traumatized, it’s with you forever. But there are ways to live with it that aren’t miserable. You can be a joyful, vigorous, exciting, excited person and still be traumatized. Those things should be true.”
And so it is that both main characters in the book find happiness, and humor, without sinking into pure tragedy.
In addition to all that, there are sinister elements within the ministry that give the book a mysterious subplot. And yet, for me the cloak-and-dagger elements were almost incidental. It was the black-edged heart and wit that kept me entranced until the very end.
