Kaliane Bradley (pronounced Cull-yan, which means âdarlingâ in Cambodian) is packing to move house when I visit her in Walthamstow, east London. The move has been made possible by the publication of her first novel, The Ministry of Time, which has a BBC TV adaptation in the pipeline and comes laden with quotes from writers such as Eleanor Catton and David Nicholls.
A time-travel romance cum sci-fi comedy set in near-future London, the novel fizzes with smart observations about the absurdity of modern life, while taking on the legacy of imperialism and the environmental emergency. In her âluckyâ jumper and woolly socks, 35-year-old Bradley, an editor at Penguin, is unfazed by the fuss. âI think I might be the first British-Cambodian person to publish a novel. I canât swear to it,â she says modestly (Google agrees: although Bradley is yet to have a Wikipedia page).
Bradleyâs father is British and her mother is Khmer. Her mother moved to the UK during the Cambodian civil war and couldnât go home. They met, literally, on her doorstep. Her father was living in this house and her mother moved in next door, with her son from her first marriage. Bradley grew up here with her half-brother and younger twin sisters: she shows me the pencil markings on the living room door frame to record their heights. The girls shared one room, her brother slept in the box room (now her study) and kept his clothes in the bathroom because it was so small. They moved out to the Essex borders when Bradley was 10, so they could each have their own bedroom, while renting out the house in Walthamstow. She and her partner, Sam, an academic in linguistics, and their cat now rent the house from her parents.
âI wrote this book kind of by accident,â Bradley says, as we settle over cups of tea and a bar of chocolate in her living room, her bookshelves lined with a mix of Penguin Classics and old favourites. On the wall is a poster of a documentary, Donât Think Iâve Forgotten, about Cambodiaâs lost rockânâroll scene in the 1950s and 60s: her mum knew one of the young guitarists. Although Bradley had published short stories â and won the 2022 VS Pritchett prize â she had spent years working on what she hoped would be her âgreat British-Cambodian novelâ â âa completely thankless, loveless, miserable task, for obvious reasonsâ, she says. This time three years ago, she had just started at Penguin but had yet to meet her colleagues because of lockdown. She took refuge in the TV series The Terror (based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), a supernatural horror about Franklinâs doomed 1845 Arctic expedition. She was especially drawn to one of the crew, Lt Graham Gore, who dies two episodes in at the age of 38. Cyber-stalking him later she was struck by a description of him as âa man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempersâ.
âI was in such a state at this point in my life that I thought, âYouâd be handling the pandemic better than me,ââ she laughs. She was smitten. A dashing portrait of Gore, all eyebrows and epaulettes, now sits in her study.
Gore led her to seek out other polar exploration enthusiasts online, âquite a community, it turns outâ. She began writing what would become The Ministry of Time in instalments for them: âa nerdy literary parlour gameâ imagining what it might be like to have your favourite explorer â Gore â move in with you. âIt just kept spinning out and I kept on going,â she says, writing 400 words or so in the evenings. âIt was just so much fun.â About halfway through, one of her new online friends said, âI think this is a novel.â
The rest of the book was written in around 12 weeks. âIt helps to be completely fixated on a dead guy,â she quips. She sent it out to literary agents under a pseudonym, but it was picked up by her existing agent. Together they spent a year intensely reworking it. The final manuscript was snapped up in a 48-hour bidding deal.
The choice of title (she dropped her working title on advice from her publisher) inadvertently cast a shadow over publication after a Spanish production company accused the BBC (and Bradley) of plagiarising the Spanish TV drama El Ministerio del Tiempo, which ran from 2015 to 2020, resulting in a twitterstorm among the shows fans. âIâve never seen the Spanish TV series,â Bradley says. âBut it sounds like a very different premise, and Iâd be surprised to learn that itâs about a romance between a Victorian polar explorer and a British-Cambodian civil servant that takes place in the 21st century.â
While the title might be a mashup of Orwellâs Ministry of Truth and Graham Greeneâs The Ministry of Fear, the guiding spirit behind the book is Bradleyâs best-loved writer, Terry Pratchett. âDonât worry about it,â the narrator instructs us early on in The Ministry of Time, brushing aside any quibbling about the logistics of time travel. Bradley is keen to point out that there isnât any actual jumping through magic portals on the page: âThe whole thing is just people sitting in different rooms experiencing emotions and bureaucracy.â
Along with Gore, she chose four other âexpatriates from historyâ to be part of the British governmentâs âexperimentâ: a lieutenant from the battle of Naseby; a beautiful, foul-mouthed lesbian from the great plague of London; an unhappy aristocrat from the French Revolution; and a soldier from the first world war. Each of them is appointed a âbridgeâ, a contemporary character who helps them âassimilateâ to life in modern Britain. Goreâs bridge is a young British-Cambodian woman.
Bradley has great fun with the old âA Martian has landed ⦠â exercise â explaining miracles such as flushing toilets, Tinder and TV (âYou can send dioramas through the ether, and youâve used it to show people at their most wretched,â Gore reflects after being introduced to EastEnders). He compares modern dating âto trying on clothes for fitâ and considers 21st-century attitudes to sex to be rather 18th century. âWhat is this word housemate?â Gore asks the narrator, and in true romcom tradition they donât stay housemates for long, despite the nearly 200-year age gap. Most of Goreâs best lines, and his willingness to experiment with south-east Asian cooking, the author confesses, are stolen from her real-life hero, Sam.
For all the sparky one-liners it affords, the time-travel conceit is a clever metaphor for what it means to be an immigrant in modern Britain. âItâs the equivalent of being plucked out of the 19th century and being told you have to assimilate, you have to have these values, you have to be productive for the society. Being told: âNow youâre here, this is who you have to be.ââ
âPeople never ask refugees, âAre you grateful?â They ask, âHow grateful are you?ââ Bradley says, quoting from the memoir Landbridge by Canadian-Cambodian writer Y-Dang Troeung, which she published at Penguin. This spark of anger behind the outlandish plot makes it more than merely a game.
âMaybe this is the British-Cambodian novel I was supposed to be writing,â she reflects. âThe sense of surprise and alienation and anxiety that you arenât being grateful enough. Because you certainly donât want to be back in the battle of the Somme. You certainly donât want to be in the Khmer Rouge.â
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She sees her own relationship to Cambodia and âthe inherited traumaâ of its history as a âfamily issueâ, rather than a personal one. Part of the difficulty of the abandoned novel was that âthere was such pressure on me to get it right that I kept on messing it up,â she says. She is very cautious when talking about her motherâs past. Through Gore, she found a way to express it. âThey are all dead,â he realises of his fellow explorers. The world he knew is gone.
Growing up in east London in the 80s, it wasnât unusual to be mixed race. She was the only one of her siblings to be sent to private secondary school â âI passed the examsâ â which she credits for her âRadio 4 accentâ. It was only when she went to university to study English literature at UCL and found herself outnumbered by white people for the first time that she began thinking of herself âas a person of colour in contemporary Britainâ.
Like the bridge in the novel, she mainly âpasses as whiteâ. But that doesnât mean she hasnât been subject to racist insults, many of which she lists in the novel, such as strangers making Pol Pot Noodle jokes. âWhy? Why would you do that?â she asks. âThese people died horribly and they were my family.â
In a knowing nod to the book worldâs recent push to improve diversity, the narrator quips about the industryâs enthusiasm for âunderpaid ⦠debut authors of colour who never seemed to publish second novels once the publicity cycle has endedâ. While Bradley has no plans to give up her day job, she is already deep into her second novel, an extension of her prize-winning short story Doggerland, once more set in London and a supernatural land of the dead.
It would be hard to write a speculative time-travel novel today without addressing the threat looming over our future. For her, our failure to respond to the climate emergency in the global south is âjust another symptom of imperialism, this idea that we can continue exploiting the labour and the resources of countries over there, and we will be fine over here,â she says. âItâs part of the same thread for me.â
While her characters might be on different timelines, her own love story has a suitably 19th-century-novel ending: she and Sam are getting married this summer, and are moving to their own home. Though she wonât be leaving London. âIâm very attached to the city,â she says. In fact, they are moving just a couple of streets away from the home her family grew up in. Itâs a sort of time-travel story of its own.