Foreign country

The Ministry of Time is a department of the British government that has developed time travel. How the boffins have done it is not important (“don’t worry about it”). Seven historical figures are to be brought through “the door” to settle into the twenty-first century. The “expats” are selected from the records of historical figures who died in isolated circumstances, ensuring that their absence from their own era should not interfere with the overarching timeline. Two of the original seven don’t survive the journey; the remaining five are from 1645, 1665, 1793, 1847 and 1916.

The expats are each assigned a “handler”, a civil servant whose job is to help them assimilate into the new era. The unnamed narrator is one of these, the daughter of a first-generation Cambodian immigrant. When we meet her at the beginning of Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, a government official is speculating that this personal history might make her a good handler. Then the story races off after the narrator and her expat, Graham Gore (1847), a real-life naval officer who died as part of the crew of the HMS Erebus.

One of the great strengths of The Ministry of Time is its understanding of the similarities and gaping differences between two places. There are many developments that Graham didn’t live to see, and Bradley reminds us of how many times the world has changed irrevocably over the past two centuries. Graham is bothered by his new knowledge of germs, for example. Day-to-day life is sometimes even more baffling for him, consisting of home cooking, computer keyboards and pre-rolled cigarettes. He is stiff, with a military bearing, but as he assimilates – passing many of his government-mandated aptitude tests with flying colours – he reveals a charismatic and vibrant character with whom the narrator (aware of the ethics) struggles to stop herself from falling in love.

Other characters are similarly well realized. There is Margaret, newly liberated from the seventeenth century, who falls in love with cinema and meeting women on dating apps, and Simellia, another of the handlers, who finds it difficult to reconcile her position as a government agent with her growing anti-establishment politics. She is a great force, constantly challenging the narrator in serious conversations about who this assimilation is really for and why they have both been selected to bring it about. Then there is Arthur, a veteran and contemporary of Wilfred Owen’s, who is quiet when he arrives in the twenty-first century with severe PTSD, but fast becomes well loved. History collides delightfully with contemporaneity in these characters’ interactions.

It is in its handling of the passage of time that the novel falls short. So many intriguing ideas are at stake in The Ministry of Time – concerning migration, the development of language (the narrator was formerly a translator for the Languages Department), surveillance, global resources and identity politics – but the plot itself (involving a high-octane assassination attempt from the future) isn’t quite up to them. The assassin develops into the major enemy (“this is a war”), but by now the world has shut down around the narrator and Graham, who are lying low in a departmental safe house, and we miss the other characters and the lens through which they see the world. The mechanics of Kaliane Bradley’s time-travel narrative are such that she is forced to keep her cards close to her chest until the end, when the final revelations emerge all at once in a rather complicated reveal.

Lily Herd is an assistant editor at the TLS

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