The Kaliane Bradley of the Time Ministry on how time travel was a metaphor to control her story

“I should establish rules on the functioning of time travel” … Kaliane Bradley
DreamCatCherdiana / Shutte RSTOCK
The embarrassing truth on the use of time travel in my novel, The Ministry of TimeIt is that at the start, it was only a tool to bring in a Victorian naval officer into the 21st century so that I could torment him with washing machines and athletics. The initial premise – “What would it be if your favorite polar explorer lived in your home?” – had to be reached in two ways. I could either have the commander Graham Gore frozen in stasis in the Arctic for 200 years, then conceive a reason to go to unearth it, otherwise I could drag it over time and throw it in a semi-detached in the suburbs of London. Of the two options, the second required a much less fat.
Even the first format of the book shared this contempt for the substantial nature of time travel. In the published version, the ministry is created from the start as a secret government department which leads a series of experiences on the so-called “expatriates” in history, in order to determine that being forced through time transforms your body or your mind to jelly. In the first version, the story started in the media res, in a rented house with a perplexed gelification asking a narrator how the refrigerators worked. The sequence – consequence – a narrative feeling that measures had been taken and produced a reaction – was far from my mind. I just wanted to make my friends laugh.
While I continued to write, however, it has become clear that I should establish rules on the functioning of time travel, if only because comedy has better landed in a particular and defined universe. (Just as thrillers do not work without issues, no more jokes; chaos without consequences is not exciting or funny.) First and foremost: expatriates cannot go back (at least the ministry insists). The ministry cannot go ahead (ditto). Expatriation is a single -way ticket. It was the only way for the laughter of the fish out of the water – and also the only reason why the dashing gore and his recalcitrant help, the narrator of the book, could possibly be forced to live together. If he could go home at any time, what would be the interest of their clumsy and increasingly intense cohabitation?
The Ministry of TimeSo, is a book on time travel in which there is almost no time trip. On 350 pages, you see that this happens once. I sometimes describe it as being less a book on the vision of eras and more a book on people who experience bureaucracy in different rooms. It is incredible anyone who picked it up.
The more I wrote with this rule in mind, the more I had to count with what I had done in Gore and the other expatriates: namely the forced people of their house and told them that they could never go back, that the Britain who welcomed them should become their new house. In addition, even if they could Come back, it would be their own death. To avoid playing with the calendar, the ministry chooses the expatriates who will die anyway, so their withdrawal will not change the course of history. Naturally, expatriates do not want to return to London of the Plague era or to the battle of the Somme or the condemned expedition of John Franklin to the Arctic. No one wants to go back to a place that will kill them. But no one wants to be foreign either in a strange country. I wrote them as a refugee.

At that time, I started to get involved with the novel more seriously. This is partly because I was obsessed with Graham Gore, a man who really existed. I tried to imagine what his life looked like, what he thought, thought, did. I read the newspapers and books of officers on the Victorian house to have an idea of how he could have experienced the world he crossed, the way I checked the weather when my husband was when we lived in different countries. More and more, I tried to get involved with what it would feel, emotionally and psychologically, to be a refugee in a government program that offers you asylum on the grounds that you will be grateful, obedient and useful.
At the same time, I had to give meaning to my ministry. I started writing this book in the fall of 2021, in the wake of a decade of the policy of “the hostile environment”. Did I really believe that the British government, by having time to travel back in time would use it to accommodate asylum seekers? Haha. What I could imagine was a government ministry wishing to make sure that the story surrounding their work was positive, and that, by extension, the story on British identity and British power was coherent and coherent. Time travel was just a metaphor to control a story. The narrator of the book underlines that she tells her own story, and therefore exists at the beginning and at the end of the book, mediating the reaction of a reader to her – isn’t that a form of time travel?
So, I have not, to my Dam, wrote a book on time travel which is, in any case, on the scientific premise to travel in time. Rather, it is a question of traveling as a migration, of time as a narration. But really, I think that all fiction is a time trip – it’s a walk through a discreet chronology, a preserved time gift that you can continuously review, postponing to a past that has not yet occurred.
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