The Ministry of Time — perspectives on love and mortality

The narrator of Kaliane Bradley’s terrific, moving debut is a civil servant — which may not sound promising, but hold tight. As the novel opens, she is applying for a mysterious promotion, working with refugees “of high-interest status and particular needs”.

With swift economy, Bradley lays it out for us. Time travel exists, her narrator’s interviewer tells her bluntly, and if the reader starts to worry about the particulars, Bradley dismisses those concerns with confidence. Yes, thinking about the physics of time travel leads to “a crock of shit”, so don’t think 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,” she writes.

The Ministry of Time is the story of that experiment. The narrator — we never learn her name — is hired to act as a “bridge” to one of five people sucked out into their timelines into the present day.

To avoid the chaos of this changing the course of history, all have been extracted from terminal situations. Margaret Kemble would have succumbed to the plague in the 1660s; Lieutenant Thomas Cardingham is plucked from the battlefields of the English civil war; Anne Spencer was facing the guillotine during the French Revolution; Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth was due to fall at the Somme.

Then there’s Commander Graham Gore of the Royal Navy, who in 1845 set off with John Franklin to discover the Northwest Passage. Franklin’s ships were famously lost in the ice, and the fate of the men on board remains to some extent a mystery. Our narrator is Gore’s bridge, and it is her job to see that he learns to cope with contemporary life (to say too much about why would be to spoil an elegant and compelling plot). 

Within that frame, Bradley creates a tale that manages to be many things at once. It has a flavour of science fiction but, in the manner of the long-running BBC series Doctor Who, never gets bogged down in technicalities. Character drives the book, and Gore — who genuinely did exist — is a compelling figure.

Bradley shows us our world through Gore’s eyes with humour and sensitivity. Startled at the impropriety of sharing a residence, he is then introduced to electricity via the washing machine, the cooker, the vacuum cleaner. “You have enslaved the power of lightning and you’ve used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help,” he says, deadpan.

The book moves at an almost leisurely pace as the pair circle around each other: guard and guarded, gradually becoming lover and beloved. Among many other things, this is a beautifully constructed romance; Gore’s early-Victorian morals mean that matters move with delicious erotic delicacy. “I moved my hands round and clasped the bookends of his back muscles, his winged bones,” our narrator relates. We are entranced, just as she is.

Bradley works as an editor at Penguin Classics when she’s not spinning tales, and that work has taught her a thing or two about structure and pacing, and also about the way in which themes — dread word — must be threaded into narrative. Her writing is clear and stylish, her dialogue dry and sprightly; the serious matters of love and mortality are cloaked in humour, but never too heavily.

If you loved Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, or the big hit of 2022, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this will be right up your street.

Franklin’s expedition was, of course, a part of the great British imperial project, and Bradley is careful to keep Gore as a man of his time, interrogating our relationship to the past. The narrator is, like the author, British-Cambodian but passes as white; does she reveal herself to Gore, or not?

Her ministry job makes her a part of the imperial project too, she knows: “The thing you do best is tell a story about yourself. Graham Gore went to the Arctic believing that a noble death is possible because of all those stories and then he became a story. Oh England, you wanted to make stories out of me.”

And finally, as the aim of the time portal begins to be revealed, this is a rattling good adventure story too, the twists at the end perfectly earned. No wonder there was a battle over TV rights — it’s being adapted for the BBC by playwright Alice Birch, whose credits include Sally Rooney’s Normal People — but don’t wait for this tale to come to the small screen. Crack this book open and you’ll see how time can disappear.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley Sceptre £16.99, 368 pages/Avid Reader Press $28.99, 352 pages

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