The Ministry of Time

By Kaliane Bradley

Avid Reader Press 2024

The literary world always takes great pride in its ability to foster talent. Out swagger the publishers in their mustard tights and fascinator hats, hoping to pipe the latest child from its crib. Will Self and Zadie Smith might strike us as the previous exemplars of this enfant terrible, scorching the stage with their highly wrought impropriety. Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel The Ministry of Time pullulates with the same verbose eccentricity and eager, brusque revolt observed in White Teeth and The Quantity Theory of Insanity without ever convincing us that the world under inspection can exist. 

Novelised time travel is a front-loaded affair requiring some explanation, no matter how rushed or specious, as to how the characters have managed to hop along the timeline. In the first of many displays of laziness and inexperience, Bradley simply clicks her fingers, does away with any pretensions of co-opting Einsteinian physics, and has figures come through a “doorway of blue light.” We mainly reside in the 21st century with an aimless civil servant (whose name remains repulsively unmentioned) put in charge of Commander Graham Gore. The demur and inhibited Gore is announced as a “temporal expat” saved from a certain frostbitten death on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845. This clash of personalities and cultural agglomerations could offer investigations into, for instance, the multivalence of freedoms and unimpeded pleasure, the dubiety of progress and the excusability of epochal sin. Sadly, these laudable points are hinted at and poked without ever being properly examined. 

After our narrator has shown Gore this century’s coffee-swilling web-surfing ropes, Bradley does an excellent job of aping his Victorian sentence formation and moral mind. “I am looking forward to seeing what visions of sin this era has concocted for the humble tavern” says Gore in one charmingly arrogant outburst. Soon this frigid world-weary ex-sailor is revving a motorcycle and spluttering in his own fumotope of cigarette addiction, but feels spectacularly let down by modernity’s counter-intuitive plenitude. “He had been handed a plush-lined life,” Bradley writes “with time to read, to pursue thoughts to their phantasmagoric end, to take in whole seasons of the British Film Institute, to walk for miles, to master sonatas and paint to his heart’s content,” and yet he repels any satisfaction. 

The expat and his ‘bridge’ go on to realise a signposted love affair (with much of the boudoir action itemised in a ruinously pornographic way) whilst this daughter of Cambodian immigrants teaches Gore the tenets of multiculturalism. With banal and predictable chutzpah, Bradley gives the 21st century opportunities to excoriate the wrongs of its archaic 18th century forefather without allowing the roles to be reversed. It is to a reader’s great dismay that the stately, prudent Commander Gore receives no column space to discuss the prurience and idleness of his new milieu. 

It is on the sentence level that The Ministry of Time deserves to be enjoyed. The blue cantankery, refined wit and delicate observations combine to make her a sui generis stylist. The “acerbic” sunlight and the air “bisected by an iron hinge of autumn cold” might resemble meretricious twaddle. “Fine capillaries of winter threaded through the autumn air” could sound like needless, unimaginable bravado. Yet Bradley’s wholehearted commitment to this bohemian precision gives her descriptions and summations a disarming, Mantelian idiosyncrasy. Lines like “there was something hauntingly young about [Gore], a scarcity of cultural context that felt teenaged, and I didn’t know if my fascination with it was maternal or predatory,” are gorgeous gut punches. It’s often jaunty with an endearing, paranoid helplessness. Readers learn that “autumn stomped on” with its “puddles of brackish rain slung across the pavements.” Most of her sand-pit similies - the inevitable corollary of playfulness and inexperience - are the bumps and bruises of an artist’s first apprenticeship. Hopefully this expressive voice will wed with seriousness as she learns to kill her pesky little darlings in books to come. 

The plot is thickened by conspiratorial loons and Gore’s fellow expats scooped up from Naseby, Robespierre’s Terror and the Somme into an unpalatable viscosity. As the future begins to tickle our protagonists from behind, it is discernible that the creator regards its messiness (and our concomitant confusion) with Nolanian schadenfreude. The Ministry of Time is a disarming fusillade of ability, mimicry, and authorial flatulence. It makes for a sterling and effortful debut finessed with all the well-shined trinkets (she really can’t leave an adjective to stand on its own two feet) and rehearsed routines. Who knows, perhaps this critic’s own temporal progeny is looking on askance as their former self fails to lionise Kaliane Bradley to the extent that her future works shall warrant. For us knuckle-draggers only able to inhabit a single era at once, we are forced to admit that time will tell. 

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull