The novel “The Ministry of Time” by Kaliane Bradley was published for the first time in 2024.
Some expatriates have been taken at various times of the past at the point of death and transported to a future London affected by climate change. To manage their adaptation to the new situation, the Ministry of Time is formed, a secret project that assigns each expatriate a so-called bridge.
Graham Gore was taken at the point of death in the Arctic during what in his future is known as Franklin’s lost expedition. To aid his adjustment, the Ministry of Time assigns him an Anglo-Cambodian woman with whom he lives in a specially prepared house. The relationship between the two of them isn’t easy, but their mutual understanding grows day by day, even as the project begins to reveal dark sides.
The story of Franklin’s lost expedition had already been told with added fantasy elements in Dan Simmons’s novel “The Terror.” During the pandemic, Kaliane Bradley spent some time watching the novel’s television adaptation. For her own amusement and that of her friends, she began writing short stories inspired by the story. “The Ministry of Time” is the result of a development of those ideas that went far beyond that way of passing the time.
Kaliane Bradley is Anglo-Cambodian, and projected part of her personal history into the novel’s protagonist, whose name is never revealed. She recounts in the first person her experience as a bridge and the relationship that gradually develops with Graham Gore. In that story, her ancestry is important, with ramifications linked to her Cambodian maternal family. However, the chapters begin with bits of Graham Gore’s story during Franklin’s lost expedition.
The protagonist’s personal struggles with being Anglo-Cambodian can be seen as the result of Kaliane Bradley’s experiences. This provides an important and realistic basis for the development of the themes of identity and belonging, with various ramifications. Everything related to both the life of an individual and a society begins there, with various comparisons to Graham Gore’s personal experiences and the society he comes from.
In developing Graham Gore, Kaliane Bradley drew inspiration from the very limited existing source material, consisting of a few notes about him written by colleagues. Essentially, we have a lot of historical information about Gore’s career and an 1845 daguerreotype, but we know very little about him as a person. The author used her fantasy to imagine how he would have reacted to finding himself outside of his time and in his interactions with the other characters in the novel.
In the first half of the novel, you might feel like nothing is happening because the story unfolds above all through conversations. The interactions between the protagonist and Graham Gore are the most important, but there are also interactions with other bridges and other expatriates. If you don’t like works heavily based on personal stories, also with romantic overtones, you might get very bored.
The second half of the novel features more action. The interactions with Adela, Vice-Secretary of Expatriation, become more important amidst what appears to be a spy story in which the time travel machine suddenly becomes central to the plot. The protagonist must juggle between assassination attempts and characters whose goals she doesn’t know.
The characteristics of “The Ministry of Time” make it a novel that has attracted diverse reactions. The subtitle suggests a mix of genres, with a romantic element, in a story that is light-hearted, especially in the first half, before becoming more dramatic. Kaliane Bradley has constructed a story that can evoke very subjective reactions, so I believe it can’t be recommended in a generic way but only to readers who feel inspired by the elements it contains. You can find it on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
