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Kaliane Bradley – The Ministry Of Time

Book Cover of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry Of Time

Doing the time warp.

Our narrator is a ‘bridge’ – a civil servant working in a top secret government ministry whose role it is to live and guide a person who has been extracted from the past and brought into the 21st century. These historical figures are people who are taken from their own time period just before the moment of their death – this gets around any pesky paradoxical issues created by time travel. Our narrator’s ‘expat’ is a man some readers may be familiar with – Graham Gore was a factual Navy Officer who died during the failed Franklin expedition to the Arctic – and in this book, he is revived in fiction twice over, once as a written character (little is known about the real man) and again through the time travel. Graham and our narrator get on quite well and Graham adjusts to the 21st century very well. But our narrator is well aware that she knows little of what’s really going on – she’s in on the secret of the government agency but not the secret’s secret. And as the year goes on and she makes friends with other ‘successful’ expats, she also finds herself feeling more for Graham than she probably should.

The Ministry Of Time is Kaliane Bradley’s phenomenal debut novel and one of the very best books of the year. (Don’t just take my word for it – it’s on many people’s lists.) Blending the sci-fi and fantasy of time travel, with the very real but little-known person of Graham Gore, adding some brilliant moments of comedy, and with some absolutely wonderful writing that manages to be literary and sparse and yet completely accessible, this is a very unique book that provides hours of absolute enjoyment and many moments of poignancy.

As the writing is the first thing this reviewer noted, it’s where we’ll start. When I say it’s literary but accessible I really mean it – Bradley doesn’t use all that much description. The Ministry Of Time is incredibly paired down in words enough that there’s a fair amount of white space within the stack of pages to the point that if it wasn’t for the slight distance you feel due to the way the first person/second person (at one point near the end) is written, you’d tear through this book at a rate of knots. Perhaps that’s the point – in creating a tale in sparse language, Bradley forces you to slow down and savour everything you’re reading, more so really think about what you’re reading. It’s the kind of book that you look forward to picking up every day but are sated enough each reading session to be happy to put it down. It is an incredible reading experience.

Yet none of this means the book lacks description – if I had to choose some words to describe this book I would pick ‘autumnal’ and that is because there are scenes set in autumn that are very immersive. Location, season, and, perhaps naturally, the progression of time, are all things Bradley, via the narrator, spends time on, with the role of ‘bridge’ being about a year long and time perhaps gaining new meaning with its manipulation having been achieved.

The characters are well created and developed – within the sparse framework there is still space to bring fully to life this unlikely band of people. The government agency, the other bridges (I think it’s safe to say that our narrator is fully realised!), the ‘expat’ time travellers. In fact, the sparse prose is very much in Graham Gore’s favour here, with his no-nonsense but caring personality and the way he responds to the many changes our narrator goes through. Their story is wonderfully written. And while the real Graham Gore may not have consented to being the hero of a love story – who knows? – it’s fair to say the representation by Bradley is considered, measured, and respectful. The narrator can be cagey, almost, sometimes, but more often she leaves things to subtext, such as her growing attraction to the man, which she shows in moments, for example, when she says that since living with Graham, her hemlines have lengthened.

The humour arrives with no warning – I think even if, unlike me, you know going in that it is an element of the book (well, you surely do now!), it will still be a surprise how and when it turns up. It’s a type of humour I can’t quite put a name to – not really laugh-out-loud or ‘typical’ British humour – but on occasion hilarious all the same whilst being mainly very… well, I’m going use the word ‘measured’ for a second time in this review. It’s obvious that a lot of work has gone into this book.

A change of tone in the second half brings poignancy, your guesses as to where the book will go perhaps mistaken. This is not to say the book becomes upsetting – it doesn’t – but the humour is dulled a little and a certain urgency and seriousness is slotted beside it.

There are a few keys threads in the novel that need mentioning. First is the look at race and multiculturalism and diversity and passing as white. The narrator, much like Bradley, is half-Cambodian, and she comments on the way people treat her and her family. In a great use of comparison, she speaks of Graham’s saying he can’t go ‘back’ – to the freezing Arctic that without the time travel intervention would’ve killed him – and how she’s always been asked by others if she’s been back to Cambodia, that place her mother had no choice but to leave. And there is a moment towards the end of Graham’s own chapters where different peoples are conflated.

(Graham’s chapters, about his last days in the Arctic, are quite a change from the rest of the narrative, and it takes a while to work out what they are for, exactly, but it’s nice to read Bradley’s nod to the real history. The hardback end papers are of his artwork. His daguerrotype picture, the only one we have, is included at the end.)

Maybe I was tired of stories, telling them and hearing them. I thought the dream was to be post-: post-modern, post-captain, post-racial. Everyone wanted me to talk about Cambodia and I had nothing to teach them about Cambodia. If you learn something about Cambodia from this account, that’s on you. […]

When I first joined the Ministry and they’d pressed me through HR, a woman ran her finger down the column with my family history. ‘What was it like growing up with that?’ she asked. She meant it all: Pol Pot Noodle jokes on first dates, my aunt’s crying jags, a stupa with no ashes, Gary Glitter, Agent Orange, we loved Angkor Wat, regime change, not knowing where the bodies were, Princess Diana, landmines, the passport in my mother’s drawer, my mother’s nightmares, fucking chink, you don’t look it, dragon ladies, fucking paki, Tuol Sleng was a school, Saloth Sar was a teacher, my grandfather’s medals, the firing squad, my uncle’s trembling hands, it’s on my bucket list, Brother Number One, I’ve got a thing for Latinas, the killing fields, The Killing Fields (1984), Angelina Jolie, do you mean Cameroonian? Do you mean Vietnamese? Will you say your name again for me?

I considered.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What was it like growing up without it?’

— Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry Of Time, page 182.

Next, history and progress – two subjects stuck together here as a theme.

I didn’t understand that my value system – my great inheritance – was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress. Things were easier for me than for my mother […] Was this not progress?

— Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry Of Time, page 117.

That history and progress are here and are together is not surprising – many paragraphs deal with a historical figure learning how to do such things as use a kettle or a washing machine, and the narrator is forced to think this way when living with him and also when considering the ministry. This feeds into the threads on climate change – 30 degrees centigrade is a cool day all things considered.

Lastly, there is some interesting intertextuality here with the 1939 novel by Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male. Graham rather likes it. A thriller set in London and dealing with London and dictators and secret police and gunshots, while I haven’t read it myself to comment on it fully, there seems enough commonality between Rogue Male and The Ministry Of Time that readers of the older work will enjoy the mentions in the newer. (I think there may be plot elements that are more similar than the Wikipedia article on Household’s novel makes out.)

The Ministry Of Time is a feat. It’s utterly unique in its writing and very different to other time travel stories, including time travel romances. This review hasn’t done it justice, and trust me, I’ve tried – if you haven’t read it yet then look out because your ‘best of 2024’ list is about to have a new entry at the 11th hour.

Publisher: Sceptre (Hachette)
Pages: 343
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-1-399-72634-4
First Published: 7th May 2024
Date Reviewed: 2nd October 2024

 
 

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