A young woman, half-Cambodian and half-Caucasian, works as a civil servant for the British government. She knows what it is like to be “othered”. She is used to seeing how people respond to her:
“People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white—Spanish maybe—and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.”
She is witty, smart, contemporary, sarcastic, and aware.
She hears about a job that pays 3x her current position and may give her job opportunities if only she can pass muster. She has a security clearance. She has a background in languages. She has high marks in first aid and Safeguarding Vulnerable People. She assumes that she’ll be working with people from Russia, from China.
So begins Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time.
Her actual job involves dealing with “expats” from history. In her case, she is the “bridge” for a man named Graham Gore, a commander with the British Royal Navy, who lived from 1809 – 1847. That would be the late Graham Gore, brought into the post-pandemic present through a portal. The intelligence wing and the military wings of the British government need individuals to closely monitor 5 expats from history, to ensure that they adjust well to the present and to understand the psychological and physical implications of their travel through time.
The Vice Secretary of Expatriations in the Ministry of Time, Adela, supervises the “handlers” who work with the “bridges,” who are each assigned one expat. The individuals all would have died in their own timelines based on historical records, with the thinking that their removal would not necessarily change the future since they were non—present in their own historical timelines, based on “historical war zones, natural disasters, and epidemics.”
The five expats from history include the following: “a woman from 1665, who was extracted from the Great Plague of London…A man—a lieutenant, I believe—from 1645, Battle of Naseby…There’s an army captain—1916. Battle of the Somme. Someone from Robespierre’s Paris, 1793; she’s got quite the psych profile.”
There are questions of research ethics. How far should a government go in capturing persons from history as “kidnap victims” and forcing them into a different time? How much “informed consent” do they actually have to this research work? What are the ethics in the “social reproduction” of historical figures into the present age? What are government interests, exactly, with this study?
The narrator’s expat comes with his own baggage—Victorian values in the modern age. She narrates:
“Every time I told Graham something—about myself, about my family, about my experience of the world we shared—I was trying to occupy space in his head. I had ideas for the shape I should take in his imagination. I told him only what I wanted him to know and believe about me. But afterward, I’d sometimes feel ill, like I was glutted on sweetmeats and dizzy with wine.”
Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time evokes Asian American identity fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, romance novels, and spy mysteries. This is a wildly imagined high-concept work. It asks: Are all people both the alpha and the omega in their own lives and their choices in the fleeting present? Are people capable of the foresight needed to anticipate history and to use that knowledge to change the past-present?
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
