Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

Welcome to the Hive, Kaliane. Congratulations on your debut, The Ministry of Time. Let’s start by telling us a bit about it. What can our readers expect? 

I often bill this as ‘a time-travel romance about empire, bureaucracy and cigarettes’ – because there’s a lot to parse there, which means people have to think about it and I have time to decide what I’m going to say next. Phew! But all these things are true. It centres on two people: a Victorian polar explorer called Graham Gore, who is ‘expatriated’ (forcibly captured) from 1847 to the 2020s as part of a government experiment to test the feasibility of time-travel; and an unnamed civil servant, his ‘bridge’, a former Ministry of Defence translator whose job for the next year is to live with, report on and help Gore assimilate to the twenty-first century. They smoke a lot of cigarettes and they experience a lot of governmental bureaucracy, some of it increasingly sinister in nature…

Let’s discuss your wonderful cast of eclectic characters. When we first meet our unnamed narrator she has absolutely no idea what she’s letting herself in for! Can you tell us more about her? How important was it for you to share her experiences as a British-Cambodian civil servant? 

The bridge is a funny character because in the very first version of the book, she was completely different. She wasn’t British-Cambodian, for a start. To be honest, she didn’t have much of a personality at all. I used her as a cipher, a blank stand-in for the reader, and it didn’t work.

It was only when I was developing some of the themes of The Ministry of Time – especially the lived experiences of first generation migrants, as the ‘expats’ from history technically are – that I started to drill more deeply into who she could be, what her relationship with power and control might be, and where her family might come from. I originally considered making her a white-passing British-Indian or British-Burmese character – someone whose family had been colonised British subjects – but it seemed disingenuous to do this when I have a specific set of experiences as a British-Cambodian person to draw on.

To tell you the truth, I actually lifted her from another novel I was writing about the years of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and the British Cambodian community. In that book, she was a cynical and ambitious doctoral candidate at a seaside university. I barely had to make any changes to her opinions to make her fit the role of ‘the bridge’. I’ve never worked as a civil servant, but some civil servant friends of mine have said I managed to hit the right notes!

And Commander Graham Gore? What was it about the Victorian explorer which initially drew you to writing about him?

Graham Gore is a real historical figure – he disappeared, along with 128 other men, on the doomed Franklin Expedition, a British expedition to discover the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. I came across him because, during lockdown, I got REALLY into historical polar exploration. As one does. 

Back in 2021, I was reading his Wikipedia page, and it contained two descriptions that dazzled me. One was a pen portrait of him by a man who had sailed with him on the Franklin expedition: a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers. Wow! A highly competent man who is also kind and good-humoured! Very hot. The other was an anecdote by a former captain of his, during a voyage to map the coast of Australia, which described Gore aiming to shoot a cockatoo. The gun blew up in Gore’s hands with such force that it gashed his palm open and threw him onto his back. When he came to, he simply quietly remarked, “Killed the bird…” Wow! A man who is preternaturally calm in a crisis and doesn’t freak out! Very hot.

After that I went down a bit of a Gore rabbit hole. There isn’t much about him available – he’s a minor figure in the annals of polar exploration – which meant, joy of joys, I got to make him up. The Graham Gore you meet in the book is a wholly fictional character, inspired by the historical figure.

We also have to touch upon your side characters. The two other ‘expats’, Margaret Kemble and Captain Reginald-Smith were both my favourites. What drew you to them? How did you find developing their contrasting personalities? 

I’m so glad you liked spending time with them! When I was choosing the origin eras of Margaret Kemble and Arthur Reginald-Smyth, I wanted to pick events that loom large in the British cultural imagination, that can be thought of as the historical backbone to our national identity. Margaret is ‘expatriated’ from the Great Plague of London in 1665; Arthur is ‘expatriated’ from the Battle of the Somme in 1916. They are intended to be representative. 

But of course, they’re not representative of anything except themselves! And that’s the fun of them. ‘History’ is a narrative that creates a broad gloss; individual people can diverge from the ‘historical’ dramatically. Arthur and Margaret are unlike hoary preconceived notions of how World War One captains or spinsters from the seventeenth century might be. Margaret is a smart, loudmouth, drop-dead-gorgeous troublemaker who should have been a riot grrrl. Arthur is a gentle, good-natured, profoundly moral person who has no interest in stiff Protestant values of Edwardian Britain. They were a joy to write. The scene where Graham and the bridge have them both over for a drunken dinner party is one of the few entirely intact scenes from the very first drafts – I didn’t want to lose it.

If you could time-travel and choose any historical figure to bring to our timeline and spend a year with, who would you choose and why? 

Graham Gore! Is that cheating? 

A little bit?

This is a tricky one, because I think some of the people it would have been fun to party with – like East German novelist Brigitte Reimann, or Elizabeth I, or Albert Camus – would be nightmarish housemates. Do you see Bess doing the washing up because I certainly don’t. 

Ditto my other favourite polar explorer, Robert McClure, who was apparently so unbearable to live with that after he returned from the Arctic after half a decade, he and his (first) wife Mary managed two weeks in the same house before something so terrible happened that they were estranged for the rest of their lives. Hmm, maybe I choose Robert McClure, actually, if only so that I can ask him what happened. His first, bizarre marriage is a mystery that preoccupies me and two other people, because we’re the only ones who know or care who Robert McClure is.

Or I would pick Ros Sereysothea, a Cambodian singer and superstar who was murdered during the Khmer Rouge regime. By all accounts she was a sweet-natured, reserved person – and considered the ‘Golden Voice’ of Cambodia’s rock’n’roll era. I would love to know more about her, and her own experience of her stratospheric and cruelly cut-short career.

Speaking of time-travel, which can be a tricky concept to approach, did you come across any particular difficulties whilst developing its use within the narrative? 

Well, I cheated a bit. Although time-travel is required to have happened in order for the book’s plot to make sense, no actual time-travel is ever seen happening on the page (except for Graham Gore’s expatriation). The bridge’s experiences of time and the book’s events are straightforwardly linear. 

I wanted to restrict how powerful time-travel was in the book, and how feasible it is to use it, because my focus was on the concept of history as a narrative that can be conformed to or resisted. So my main difficulty was in setting up a world where time-travel could exist but is broadly avoided, and why, given that it’s such a powerful tool, characters would be moved to avoid it.

An aspect I love about The Ministry of Time is the razor-sharp humour. Had you always planned to write about the ‘expats’ experiences of modern life in such a comical way, or did that just naturally develop as you began writing?

I love being asked this. Yes, I’m afraid it’s true: I’m just a naturally hilarious, witty, adorable person. Don’t let my agent and my editors tell you otherwise. Don’t LISTEN to them when they say they had to take out half the crap jokes because I was the only one who found them funny and I was just muttering to my own navel for most of the early drafts. Pay NO ATTENTION when you learn that half the truly funny things that Graham says I stole from my funny fiancé anyway. NEVER MIND that Terry Pratchett is my all-time favourite author and I’ve been reading him since I was ten years old and he’s had an outsized influence on the way I express myself. It’s all me, baby!

Joking aside, I wasn’t really aware I was writing a comical book until people told me it was comical. I am very pleased about this. Thank you for this question, which has improved my weekend to no end.

And how did you find balancing the humour with the much deeper themes of racism, colonialism and post-colonialism, which are well portrayed throughout? 

Haha, well, see above – it’s such a natural mode of expression for me that it happens automatically. But this is a serious question, so I will give you a serious answer. I think that humour is an important and frequently underestimated tool for exploring uncomfortable ideas or situations, and one that may make difficult things easier to approach. 

I don’t think that everything should be a joke – if all that a joke can do is shock and wound then it’s just bullying and has no artistic value – but I do believe in jester’s privilege (that a jester should mock power without power taking vengeance, because those jests can draw attention to real faults). You will be unsurprised to learn that my favourite Shakespeare play is King Lear.

We see such varying opinions from authors when it comes to the time of editing their books. How have you found the editing process? Enjoyable, stressful or satisfying?

Being edited by other people? Blissful. The editorial process for The Ministry of Time was a really collaborative, generous, open one, and pushed me to write my best work. I can hardly express how improved my book is from first draft.

Editing myself? Horrible torture. I live with myself every day and now I have to look at stuff that past me put on a page? Disgusting. Someone call the UN. 

Can you tell us about a time-travel book or film you love? Were there any which significantly inspired you?

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett – of course. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which is stylistically amazing and a great take on time-travel. For me, Slaughterhouse-Five is not so much about literally travelling through time as it is about the experience of PTSD, the way that trauma can make you live and relive the same moment again and again; but also that a life is not its end point, and that the things that are done in the process of living a life are as relevant and immediate as its end. It’s also incredibly funny. I hope that two themes that will come up for readers of The Ministry of Time are the effects of experienced and inherited trauma, and the importance of taking responsibility for the actions you make in the process of living a life.

It’s not a time-travel book, but Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley was an enormous influence on me, and directly inspired the concepts of ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ in The Ministry of Time. Riley, a poet and philosopher, wrote the book after the death of her son, and it explores the experience of grieving as an arrest of sequential time that changes how you might perceive ‘afterwards’ or a future, even the end of a sentence.

Also not exactly a time-travel film – actually I’m really pushing the intent of the question here – but Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye is an exquisite portrait of a person whose values belong to a different era experiencing the ‘present day’, just as Graham Gore does. In this case, the person is Philip Marlowe, his old-school private eye values belong to the 1940s, and he is experiencing ‘present day’ 1970s California. This eventually causes an inconceivable ethical rupture… though I won’t spoil it for you. Also Elliott Gould as Marlowe would have made a good Graham Gore. I think there’s only about forty seconds on screen that he isn’t smoking a cigarette.

What’s next for you, Kaliane? Do you have any upcoming projects which you can share?

I am currently working on my second novel, which is set partly in the land of the dead and partly in contemporary London. I said this to an interviewer and he said, “Aren’t they the same place?” Ho ho and hee hee. It’s a sort of Greek mythology retelling, in which I throw out all the rules regarding retellings, and a neo-noir mystery. I’m having a great time writing it.

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

That it is within all our power – as individuals, as part of communities, by showing solidarity – to effect change, to swing us onto a ‘good timeline’, and change the future!

Thank you so much for joining us today!

Thank you!

The Ministry of Time is out this week! You can order your copy HERE