‘I went slightly nuts’: How a TV horror binge inspired this bestselling time-travel novel

Kaliane Bradley spent several exhausting days at the London Book Fair. No, she wasn’t spruiking her hugely successful first novel, The Ministry of Time. That was done in 2023 when it was only a manuscript and was snapped up by publishers around the world and deemed one of the books of the fair (the other being R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface). She had been there for her day job as an editor at Penguin Press, where she works on non-fiction titles and the Penguin Classics series.

She had previously edited commercial fiction at a different publisher and is puzzled why she didn’t write a novel then. “But I did as soon as I moved to a place where I was either working on classics that don’t need structural editing or on non-fiction, which does involve structure but is a different kind of storytelling. I wonder if I did require that mental separation.”

Kaliane Bradley’s time-travel novel, The Ministry of Time, brings Graham Gore, who was on Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition, back to life.Credit: Robin Christian

The Ministry of Time, which was chosen by Barack Obama on his summer reading list last year, is a whip-smart novel with elements of time travel, consideration of the fate of refugees and asylum seekers, questions of identity, the nature of history and much more. It makes you think, but it also makes you laugh, and it’s pretty sexy. Not a bad combination for a first book. Sales in Australia alone have exceeded 40,000.

It’s the near future and British authorities have developed the means to travel through time. Their first use of the invention involves bringing “expatriates” who were about to die in their own eras into the 21st century.

These characters will need to adjust to their new circumstances and are paired with a “bridge” to guide them in their new lives. One such bridge is the narrator: “We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.” Her expat – and the novel’s other central character – is Graham Gore, a British naval commander who died on Sir John Franklin’s disastrous 1845 Arctic expedition that resulted in the loss of 129 men.

It’s no lie to say Bradley chose Gore because she was obsessed with him. During lockdown, she had been watching the television adaptation of Dan Simmons’ Arctic supernatural horror novel, The Terror, in which Gore featured. She looked him up on Wikipedia.

“That was it. That was the moment: he was just very handsome, very dashing, and he has a great biography,” she says. “I didn’t even know about this expedition, and now I have a full bookshelf about polar exploration. I went slightly nuts because of this series. It was great because I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t go to any archives, but I did go online and find this wonderful community of people who were also either interested in this series or in the historical polar expeditions, and they were really generous [with their research].”

Having been welcomed into that niche online community, she wrote stories featuring Gore adjusting to the 21st century: “It was something to write as a kind of thank you, a kind of game to make them laugh – what would it be like if your favourite polar explorer lived in your house?”

And that turned into the first draft of The Ministry, which she wrote in 11 weeks: “It started out as a silly game and it’s ended as much more.”

Graham Gore.Credit:

She picked the four other expats as representative of significant moments in history: Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth was plucked from World War I; Margaret Kemble from the plague in 1665; Thomas Cardingham, a lieutenant in the English Civil War in 1645, and Anne Spencer from Robespierre’s Paris in 1793. At one point, Gore and Kemble watch the film, 1917: “Poor Arthur,” says Gore. “I had no idea.”

Bradley has a lot of fun with Gore in 21st century London and takes plenty of liberties with his character. “There is one mention in a letter of him smoking over the side of a boat, so I made him a chain smoker – that kind of thing.”

So Gore learns to ride a bicycle, struggles to type, is entranced by music streaming, hates the Beatles but loves Tamla Motown music. He likes Great Expectations, finds Master and Commander “upsettingly nostalgic”, Hemingway “shocking”, and immerses himself in Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller Rogue Male. As a Victorian, he is uncomfortable sharing a house with an unmarried woman and is perplexed when some young women call him a DILF.

“I sometimes think, wouldn’t it be awful if he really came back and read this book? He’d be so angry with me,” Bradley says. “I would like to imagine that, given that he was a very friendly and warm and curious person, he would have been as open to the 21st century as the character in the book. Realistically, I think he would have hated it.”

But Bradley is doing much more than having fun. As a person of mixed race – Cambodian and British – and making her narrator the same, she writes plenty about “the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, [that] roll like floods across human history”. After all, the expats face the same problems – “psychologically and emotionally, they would be experiencing the kind of dissociation, loneliness, strangeness of a refugee”. As she has a heritage of exodus, she knew she could write it well.

Kaliane Bradley says she’ll never has as much fun writing again as she did with The Ministry of Time. Credit: Robin Christian

She borrowed the character of the unnamed narrator from a novel she had been writing about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. Bradley says all the racist comments directed at the bridge have been said to her. Hard to believe that on a first date, someone made a crack to her about “Pol Pot noodles”.

Her Cambodian mother is working her way through the book, but because English is not her first language, it’s taking time. “She does refer to the mother in the book as ‘me’, and the bridge as if she’s her daughter. I have had to say, ‘Mum, have you noticed these aren’t our lives?’”

Bradley’s Cambodian novel remains in her bottom drawer. She felt some sort of obligation to write about Cambodia – she has visited there – the Cambodian diaspora, the Khmer Rouge and her family, but “obligation”, she says, “is the death of creativity”.

“Every time I read it, I think what am I going to say with this? What am I offering a readership by just recounting, again, the atrocities. In non-fiction that is useful as a kind of investigative thing, but in fiction I don’t know if I’m adding anything to the world by saying that.”

But she has finished a second novel that should be published next year.

“It’s partly about a woman in a lighthouse who is between the land of living and the land of the dead, and she has a series of apprentices ... Occasionally, I describe it as being a book about closure and partly a book about the fact that we all have death in common, but we can choose to have love in common.”

What she is sure about is that she’ll never have as much fun writing as with The Ministry: “It was such a joy, it was so freeing. I’m often asked what genre were you writing, and the answer is: I wasn’t because I wasn’t writing for a market.” As she puts it, you only get to be a debut novelist once.

But that doesn’t mean she can’t revisit that first novel, which is being adapted for the small screen. Indeed, she has a sequel in mind.

“I have an idea of what happens. And I do think there would have to be quite a lot of change. The romantic hero of The Ministry has gone through so much and is very upset, so I think would be a slightly different character – they would both be different characters. They changed so much over the book. I don’t know whether people would find that terribly distressing to encounter a very changed Graham.”

Meanwhile, Bradley will have to make do with the striking picture of Graham Gore on the wall behind her desk.

The Ministry of Time is published by Sceptre. Kaliane Bradley is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival and Sydney Writers’ Festival.

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