The Clear Link Between Time Travel and Colonization in THE MINISTRY OF TIME
My spoiler filled thoughts on the Graham Gore fic.
I really loved Kaliane Bradley’s THE MINISTRY OF TIME. It was smart and sultry, and felt like a niche read (the niche is me.) That said, my thoughts are full of spoilers. Stick to the first paragraph or so if you haven’t read this one. I’ll mark the ever-increasing risk of spoilers as I go.
In The Ministry of Time, time travel as a metaphor for colonization is not subtle.The author Kaliane Bradley has outright told us that The Ministry of Time is about imperialism. 1 The metaphor doesn’t have to be subtle to be effective in this novel. In fact, that’s what makes this book much more than a simple fish-out-of-water, odd couple romance. The main character, known only as “the bridge,” is British-Cambodian. She is tasked by the British government with helping time expatriate, Graham Gore, acclimate to modern society. They bond over shared experiences of feeling displaced. They both struggle to reconcile their inner world with their outer world, feeling adrift in an empire that is meant to be their home but doesn’t exactly feel like one.
This same experience that draws them together into a tender, passionate relationship is the same tension that makes the relationship so fraught. After all, Graham was a Naval officer aboard the real-life doomed Franklin expedition to chart the Northwest Passage. He was a pawn of the British Empire and his crew roamed freely over land already occupied by Inuits. The bridge’s Cambodian family was harmed irrevocably by a European colonizing force, yet what she and the Ministry have done to the time expatriates is similar. They yanked them out of their homeland, displaced them somewhere foreign, and pushed them to assimilate, and the bridge is simply a pawn of a much larger, more powerful organization than herself. The bridge and Graham’s careers are two sides of the same coin.
It’s interesting that Graham is a Victorian specifically (the other expats hail from other eras) given that the seminal time travel novel, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine was written during the Victorian era at the height of Britain’s imperialist conquests. The Time Machine has been examined for its depiction of class struggle among future races and criticized for the racial implications we can draw from his two future humanoid societies. 2 The way time travel is examined in The Ministry of Time is a clever subversion of what came before it.
The romance angle makes this book stand out from the pack and was heavily marketed from what I saw on TikTok. Even though this book is very much about more than romance, the romance is still exhilarating, even though it’s ultimately troubling. Victorian novels have a grand tradition of restrained romance full of staid pining and repressed desire. As Graham Gore and his bridge connect over their shared otherness, the tension builds, and after a moment of danger, it breaks in heated scenes that spare no details. As a protagonist, Graham is extremely charming. He’s got an excellent sense of humor, a strong sense of duty, and a very Navyman-ish loyalty alongside a protective streak. It’s completely believable that the bridge falls for him, even despite the troubling aspects to this relationship. (At least to me, the history loving nerd willing to join Bradley’s Graham Gore likers club.)
So, why is the romance troubling? First of all, Graham is a colonizer and a murderer. We learn he accidentally killed an Inuit man during the Arctic expedition. The bridge meanwhile is half Cambodian, and says she is the only mixed race worker in her office. Why does she seem comfortable living with Graham, falling for Graham, knowing his role in the creation of the colonial British empire? The book isn’t afraid to show us the answer. The bridge holds an inordinate amount of power over Graham. She is the key to his knowledge of life in the modern era. She’s also his captor. At different points in the novel, the Ministry instructs the bridge to keep Graham in their neighborhood and she complies. The bridge tells us that she is eager to be good at her job, that she welcomes the power the Ministry offers her even as she begins to see signs that the Ministry’s time travel project will harm the expatriates she’s been tasked with assimilating, the same people she’s come to love as friends and in Graham’s case, something more.
As the true nature of the time travel project is revealed, we learn that everything the Ministry does is harmful not just to the expats, but to untold billions of future humans. The Ministry’s hubris even gets one of the expats killed. Graham ultimately feels used by the bridge and betrayed when he loses his expat friend. Graham and the bridge’s relationship is not one between equals. If the genders were reversed, I’m sure a lot fewer readers would feel it was very romantic. It’s clear why the bridge has fallen for Graham, but what does Graham see in the bridge? This is a smart book and author, so it shows us this too. After accidentally murdering an Inuit man in his timeline, Graham must confront the man’s distraught wife. He can’t speak to her, but he’s never forgotten his guilt or the details of her devastated face. The bridge resembles this woman to Graham. He feels that being with her, making her happy, is what he owes the cosmic order. Ultimately, this romance was doomed, and the book shows us exactly why that is while still delivering us something of a happy ending.
A few readers have described the Ministry of Time ending as confusing, but I have to disagree. Once again it leveraged the time travel metaphor but this time, it meant something different. The book tells us exactly what:
Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time travel. 3
If this book’s themes are empire and refugeeism, this is a natural step for the time travel metaphor to take as forgiveness could be seen as reparations. There is a chain of narrative reparations throughout the book. First, Graham feels guilty about the wife of the Inuit man he murdered in his time. This makes him feel he was intended to be with the bridge and make her happy. Adela is a future version of the bridge who returned to the past in an attempt to spare the lives of her friends and “fix” her war-ravaged timeline. But what about the Brigadier and Salese, (the villains of the piece) and their mole Simellia? Their goals are no different from Adela’s. Samellia reveals that she betrayed the Ministry when she finds that the entirety of Sub-Saharan Africa was destroyed in the climate disaster, the one that the Brigadier and Salese have traveled back in time to prevent. As for the bridge, she betrayed Graham and her other expat friends by endangering them with secrets she kept to protect her job at the Ministry, bringing us up to this final metaphor in which she implies she makes right with Graham.
The plot of this entire story is a cast of characters trying to make reparations for the past, for better or worse. Whether they’re successful doesn’t matter. It’s the way they wield time travel and relate to their place in the past, present, and future, that makes The Ministry of Time what it is, which is a thoughtful look at what we owe the people of the past, present, and future.
Sources: