Sunday Pages: "The Ministry of Time"

A novel by Kaliane Bradley

Dear Reader,

Time does not move at a constant rate. It can’t.

Consider: A gunman fired into the crowd at a Trump rally in Western Pennsylvania; one man died, two were injured, and the FPOTUS was either grazed by a bullet (if you believe Donald and No-Longer-Dr. Ronny Jackson) or hit with glass shrapnel from a nearby screen (if you believe initial reports on the scene, the trying-to-be-nice testimony of FBI Director Chris Wray, former White House photographer Pete Souza, and all logic and available evidence).

The shooting happened on Saturday, July 13th—two weeks ago yesterday. A fortnight. I had to look at the date on the calendar, count the interval between then and now, and do the arithmetic three times, to make sure it wasn’t three weeks ago, or a month. I’m still not sure I didn’t screw up the math. How could it have only been 15 days since that went down?

As the details of the shooting came in, and the press revealed the identity of the gunman, someone—I can’t remember who—tweeted: “What if the shooter was from the future?” This gave me pause. We don’t have time-travel, of course, but if we did: Why would an operative from the Yet To Be decide to take out Trump now? Why not when he descended that ridiculous escalator? Or as soon as he walked into a private room with Jeffrey Epstein?

I recall the question put to Jeb Bush on the campaign trail in 2015: if he could go back in time, would he strangle an infant Adolf Hitler in his crib?

“Hell yeah, I would!” Bush answered. “You gotta step up.”

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Every so often, I have an uncanny sense about a new novel that I just know is going to be amazing. It was like that with Station Eleven: I bought it as soon as I was aware it existed, and I devoured it, and I loved it. So it was with The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley’s recently-released debut. Yes, there is buzz around the book, but there’s buzz around a lot of books that don’t hit as hard. I just knew—as if some future Greg Olear traveled back to the recent past to hip me to it.

The Ministry of Time is a work of speculative fiction, a travelogue about a doomed naval expedition to the Arctic in 1847, a cross-cultural and cross-centurial romance, a comedy of situation, a paranoid thriller, a statement about empire and colonialism and cultural assimilation and modern technology and generational trauma, a meditation on loss and belonging and identity, a warning about climate change, and a deeply moving piece of writing that left me in tears at the end. Not only is it all of those things, but it is the best iteration of all of those things, effortlessly blended into one propulsive story.

The buzz seems to derive from how funny it is—looking over the Google search page, I saw one grouchy reviewer resentful of said “funny” buzz—but while the humor never abates, it is gradually subsumed during the course of the story by darker and more serious attributes: something that is, artistically, hard to pull off. Yes, the book is really funny. It’s also clever and sexy and thought-provoking and creative and very, very smart. Reading through it a second time, I marvel at its elegant construction, its use of foreshadowing, how it conveys information, what it is that we’re actually reading: the novelist’s tricks and techniques expertly employed.

The titular Ministry of Time—a title that, as best as I can tell, is never realized in the novel—is exactly and un-Orwellianly that: the bureaucratic department of the British government responsible for all things time-travel. Bradley must contend with the inherent logical fallacies that roil all time-travel works, from The Time Machine to The Terminator to Tenet. She acknowledges this, and surrenders to it, in the first pages of the novel:

Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle by considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work? 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. All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.

The main character is named Graham Gore. He was a real person, an actual historical figure—a Commander of the Royal Navy, an amateur painter and flutist, and a polar explorer who lost his life in the Arctic sometime in late 1847 or early 1848. Incredibly, there exists a daguerreotype image of him taken in 1845. He’s an interesting guy, even in the sub-chapters of the novel that chronicle the expedition. But Bradley has taken Commander Gore and deposited him in London in the not-too-distant future. The result is fascinating, at times hilarious—as when Gore comes home after walking through London and innocently asks “What is a DILF?”—and at times heartbreaking. Here is an early-in-the-book description of him:

At the crux of all the time-travel hypothesis was the question: How do you measure a person? Graham scored very high on spatial-reasoning tests and well on verbal-reasoning tests. He was, according to his psychoanalyst, dangerously repressed; but then again, according to the acclimatization examiners, he was gregarious and confident. He was the eldest of five children, after the death of his older brother at sea. He was an inch below average height, though in his own era he had been two inches above it. He had hazel eyes, a mass of curly dark hair, and a remarkable nose. He was thirty-seven years old and had been thirty-seven for nearly two hundred years.

In that HuffPo interview about killing baby Adolf, Jeb Bush, after contemplating what radical change messing with the wings of that butterfly might cause, adds: “It could have a dangerous effect on everything else, but I’d do it—I mean, Hitler.” Bradley gets around that problem, too:

In order to avoid the chaos inherent in changing the course of history—if “history” could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crack of shit—it was agreed that it would be necessary to extract people from historical war zones, natural disasters, and epidemics. These expatriates to the twenty-first century would have died in their own timelines anyway. Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future.

There are a handful of these “expats” from the past, and they are known, and call each other, by the year in which they died. Thus Gore is “Forty-seven,” and his friend Arthur, who perished at the Battle of the Somme, is “Sixteen.”

The book’s nameless narrator is Gore’s “bridge.” It is her job at the Ministry to help the Victorian seaman transition to landlubbing Londoner of the mid-twenty-first century. And, like, the two centuries between Gore’s real-life death and the England of The Ministry of Time are like a time-wrap, in terms of technology, science, philosophy, art—everything. “As it was,” she writes, “he was thirty-seven years old and had not experienced crinolines, A Tale of Two Cities, or the enfranchisement of the working classes.” Also dishwashers, motorcycles, and online dating apps.

The book’s narrator, like its real author, is the daughter of a British father and a Cambodian mother. Her ethnic background is significant to the story: a woman, a descendent of a colonized people, living in a country decades after the fall of the British Empire, is placed in a redbrick house with the very model of English colonialism and maritime might, a self-confident Victorian naval officer as good with the paintbrushes as he is with the pistol.

The narrator is in love with Graham Gore. I’m pretty sure Kaliane Bradley is, too. “He was here,” she writes, “by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does.” It’s very hard, as a writer, to fake that kind of passion.

In The Ministry of Time, there’s a little bit of Graham Greene, whose 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear Bradley references, and Rogue Male, the other Graham’s favorite book, which sounds like an anthology of Jordan Peterson essays but is actually a swashbuckling 1938 novel by the wonderfully-named Geoffrey Household (not, haha, a Household name!). The tone and humor and light sci-fi call to mind Kurt Vonnegut; the shift in eras, Cloud Atlas.

And yet The Ministry of Time is distinct and original, and could only have been produced by Kaliane Bradley in the here and now. She has thought all of this through, obsessively. How do you bring an “expat” like that into the present, or the not-too-distant future? How do you catch him up on the history he’s missed during his twenty decades of sleep? And: how do you explain WWII—how do you explain the Holocaust—to a man who was born during the Napoleonic Wars and who died a year before the revolutions of 1848?

But then, how do you explain the Holocaust to anyone?

There are many, many excellent lines I’d like to share from the novel—too many. The last paragraph especially I want to talk about, but I don’t want to spoil it. You’ll just have to read the book for yourself. I will confine myself to this excerpt, which takes place after the narrator inadvertently brings up Auschwitz and then screws up explaining it to Gore:

You think I was clumsy. You think I could have handled it better. No doubt you’re right. It was a teaching moment that I fumbled; worse, it was a moment I’d created, and my actions had consequences. But what could I have said? That the Holocaust was one of the most appalling, most shameful stains on the history of humanity, and it could have been prevented? Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future. Believe me when I say that time-travel taught me that.

(Gore, by the way, would totally have gone back to the past…or, in his case, the future…and whacked Baby Hitler.)

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Are we sure there’s not time-travel? Sometimes it seems like certain historical figures were beamed back from the future. Lincoln, for example, feels much more modern than his contemporaries, writes in a more modern tone than they do, looks like a space alien. Shakespeare produced so much excellent writing that serious people insist it cannot be the work of a single, non-aristocratic human. Wilt Chamberlain for sure. If I told you Elon Musk was sent back in time in AD 2078, a time-travel exile, as punishment for being such an insufferable troll—I mean, that makes as much sense as anything else, right?

Frustrating as it may be in our age of science and knowledge, there are still things that cannot be explained. We can write dissertations on the rise of Trump, but the ascension of that petty, lying, mobbed-up rapist to the White House will always be inexplicable to me.

A week ago, when the President dropped out and endorsed the Vice President, there was a shift in the collective energy as palpable and real as a shift in the earth’s tectonic plates. We all felt the tumultuous recalibration, even the MAGA. Why then? Why that? I don’t really know, and neither does anyone else. It is, and will always be, one of life’s mysteries.

Suffice it to say, the following statement is true of both the seismic shift that gave us Candidate Kamala and Kaliane Bradley’s brilliant debut novel:

It’s about time.

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ICYMI

Our guest on the one hundredth episode of The Five 8 was the journalist and author Ernest Owens. There was also an appearance by Chunk, as well as a surprise visit from FPOTUS!

We also made this:

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Here is Bradley talking about her book:

@avidreaderpressHere are three reasons to read the brilliant time travel romance/spy thriller/workplace comedy debut novel THE MINISTRY OF TIME, from the author Kaliane Bradley! 📖 ✨

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