Time travel is hard to wrap your head around, especially when distracted by a total hottie from nearly 200 years ago. Movies like Groundhog Day, or even Palm Springs, try to smooth over the ethical questions of sleeping with a time traveler with movie magic; books like Time Traveler’s Wife do their best to ignore them entirely. The Ministry of Time however doesn’t back away from these questions, instead it plunges readers head first into the murky waters of consent, workplace romance, and hot time travelers.
Commander Graham Gore was a real person who went on a real Arctic voyage, but this book is about a fictional Gore who gets scooped up by time-cops who bring him to our modern day and assign him a buddy aka “The Bridge”, our unnamed narrator. Spoilers ahead but the budding romance between these two gets thorny quickly, and the ethical questions at hand aren’t lost on our characters. Can a man like Gore satisfy a modern woman? Can our protagonist put her James Bond dreams aside enough to have a meaningful relationship with someone she’s assigned to protect? To make matters more complicated, we also have Arthur from 1916 and Margaret from 1665—one of which is also hot, and the other seems to be crushing on Gore!
I reached out to author Kaliane Bradley to discuss the ethics of both time traveling and relationships in The Ministry of Time:
Bri Kane: How did you make that decision to have a real person be your time traveler?
Kaliane Bradley: So I suppose what happened is that I never intended for this to be a book, it was really just written to entertain some friends. I decided to start writing this because I got very into polar exploration and the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage. I became very fixated on this minor character Graham Gore, but because there’s so little information about this man, quite a lot of the character in the book is completely fictional.
BK:One thing I thought was really interesting is it seems like you very purposely avoided a true love triangle. I wanted to talk to you about the main relationships and how you decided to balance who kisses and who doesn’t.
KB: So I suppose the central relationship was always between “The Bridge” and Graham Gore. As I was developing the story, I became very interested in the idea that these two are operatives for their respective governments and the ways that they have tried to conform to the idealized version of a British operative. Gore revealed that he’s had relationships with men but we don’t know to what extent they’ve been emotional or whether they were just situational. And “The Bridge” is clearly not aware of her attraction to Maggie. Because they are both so determined to be the correct kind of operative, they very much funnel all their desires into the straight relationship. By contrast, Margaret and Arthur have absolutely no interest in this kind of thing, they both want to experience joy and they want to thrive, they don’t just want to survive.
BK: Yeah, they all have interests beyond just who are they going to start kissing, they have things that they want to explore that are not related to love. I was really interested in how you decided to include characters that a modern reader would label as bisexual, even though that’s not the language they used to explain those experiences.
KB: Partly it was just spending so much time thinking about these men on the Franklin expedition. One of the things that repeatedly came up for me was the fact that I was very interested in what was functionally a British colonial project; so how to square being very deeply obsessed with something that I think is objectively bad. I wanted the reader to be seduced by the idea of the romance. I also just didn’t imagine anyone as straight, if you see what I mean. None of them came to me as straight people.
BK: It’s really interesting that as you were developing these characters you never envisioned them as straight people—that makes a lot of sense to me. I wanted to ask you, if you think a man like Gore, who is about as old school as you can get, would be good at sex given our modern definitions of a good time?
KB: I mean, I definitely wrote him as being good at it. I felt for Gore in particular what was important to me was that he retained a sense of curiosity; I wanted someone who explores. He’s curious, he’s willing to learn, he’s willing to be open. The way he approaches sex, I hope, is similar to the way that he approaches adapting to the 21st century: with curiosity, with empathy. That first sex scene is very much about his anxiety of connecting and getting it right and being a good officer, which he’s obsessed with. Even as their relationship develops, he’s very anxious about the level at which he’s connecting, and whether or not he’s connecting in a way that feels empathetic, romantic and fitting to her desires.
BK: So I need to ask you—if you were our protagonist, and you have this gorgeous Gore standing in front of you, do you think you would act on those feelings?
Margaret and Arthur both want to experience joy and to thrive, they don’t just want to survive.
KB: If it was me personally, I think I would have been much more suspicious about this project. The narrator obviously is a little bit suspicious, but she’s so interested in this idea of gaining control of a situation and the idea of the power structure, I would like to think I would be a little bit more suspicious of complying with power. When you comply with power structures, you are also giving up a certain amount of agency. It is kind of deranged of her actually to do this but she was so enjoyable to write because she is someone who you’re supposed to kind of recoil from but be seduced by. Seduced by the rom-com, the fish out of water, the burgeoning romance, and I quite liked the way that I pulled that off. Because she’s in a position where she is exploiting, she has power over him, she is the officer in charge—it is a slightly dubious decision. The fact that he is attracted to her and wants to be with her does not stop it from being a dubious decision.
BK: Yeah, there are thorns to navigate even if they choose to navigate them together. It’s interesting to hear you talk about this as a rom-com because it is in so many ways, but it is not in so many other ways.
KB: I didn’t want them to end up together, because I thought that would slightly defy the point of the journey that the Bridge has gone on. And then at the time she is writing this text that is a kind of document to herself to saying, these are the mistakes you’ve made.. It turns out when they do end up together, they are both fucking miserable. The only way I could see that story ending is with them having to be apart and having to decide for themselves what they want to do next.
BK: Now, that seems like the answer to my next question: What future can two people from different points in time even have together? There’s the happily ever after achievements: they got married, they had a kid, everything’s fine, right?
KB: I like the idea that the term ‘rom-com’ is a sort of red herring. I like the idea that you’re seduced, as a reader, by the idea of the rom-com and that like “The Bridge” you don’t notice the kind of creeping darkness in the background.
BK: Absolutely. Okay, so once and for all: How can you ever truly have an ethical sexual relationship with a time traveler?
I like the idea that you’re seduced, as a reader, by the idea of the rom-com and you don’t notice the kind of creeping darkness in the background.
KB: That is an interesting question. When I was developing this book into The Ministry of Time, the thing that I became very, very interested in was the parallel between these time travelers who are functionally refugees from history and the idea of refugees from other countries. So they’re all brought to 21st-century Britain, they can’t ever go home, they have to become good British citizens, they have to assimilate. I’m not sure I could say it’s impossible, because I also think it’s possible for someone who has come from a vulnerable situation, such as being a refugee, to have ethical, full, and joyous relationships with British citizens. If you’ve traveled through time or traveled across space, I don’t think that precludes the possibility of an equal, empathetic, mutually fulfilling relationship.
BK: So if you were given the opportunity to walk through this time travel machine, would you look for a lover on the other side?
KB: I guess it depends on what I’m doing walking through the machine, right? Because if you want to walk through and never come back, that’s your life now and I would like to imagine it would be a life that included friendship, romance, and challenges and all sorts of things. I mean, if I was just hopping back in time to find some fun… Tinder exists, but also I’m engaged!