The Ministry of Time

“‘Don’t you think,’ said Simellia, ‘that throwing them into the world when they think they’re in the afterlife or on the western front might impede their adjustment? I ask both as a psychologist and a person with a normal level of empathy.’”

Simellia’s question probes the more specific ethical dilemmas relevant to the expatriation project. Simellia’s considerations emphasize the narrator’s lack of attention to such concerns. The narrator willfully ignores them because she benefits by aligning herself with the Ministry’s interests. On a broader level, this statement suggests that the government’s standards of empathy differ from those of the general population.

“He didn’t know about the First and Second World Wars or the Cold War, the sexual liberation of the 1960s, or the war on terror. They had started by telling him about the dismantling of the British Empire, and it hadn’t gone down well.”

Bradley began writing The Ministry of Time as a way to imagine what it would be like to have her favorite polar explorer living with her. She develops this thought experiment by depicting expats’ experience of culture shock. This brief list of significant historical events and movements introduces the novel’s thematic examination of social and technological progress.

“The more I got to know him, the more I discovered Gore was the most entirely realized person I’d ever met. In his own time, he had liked hunting, sketching, flute playing (he was very good at this), and the company of other people.”

Graham Gore is an impressive man. Charming, multitalented, kind, intelligent, and strong, his personality and character are central aspects of the novel for several reasons. His appeal as a romantic interest adds an element of the romance genre to the text, broadening its market demographic. It also motivates the narrator’s crush-turned-obsession, which is at the heart of several of the book’s conflicts.

“‘Will your women’s brains not overheat?’ […] I was discomfited by this stilted forbearance of our sex and our skin. It’s not that I wanted to be someone like Ralph, any more than I wanted to develop a crust, but I’d fondly imagined authority as an equalizer.”

The narrator grapples with ideas of gender equality as the text explores the shortcomings and fallacies of social progress. Encountering the expats’ antiquated notions, like the idea of women’s brains overheating, is unfamiliar territory, forcing the narrator to question how much authority she really has in a society that hasn’t yet eradicated sexism.

“‘Do you have a favorite? Author. Not war.’ ‘Graham Greene,’ he said. ‘He wrote a superb 1943 novel that I think of often. Have you read it? The Ministry of Fear.’”

Graham’s reference to The Ministry of Fear imbues the Ministry in this novel with additional symbolic meaning. Greene’s title refers to a Nazi spy ring that uses the intelligence it gathers to extort opponents and bolster the Nazi regime’s power and status. The Ministry of Time similarly operates above the law to maintain status and power, thematically foregrounding The Ethics of Government Experiments.

“History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening. […] History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future. It’s an important semantic differentiation in this field.”

Rather than approaching time travel from a scientific, operational perspective, the book’s subtext probes the political uses of time travel. According to what Adela says here, the value of time travel relates to history as a story about who’s right and who’s wrong, which in turn shapes power dynamics. How the world views the Ministry is a significant part of why Adela, the Brigadier, and Salese travel back in time. For them, changing the past is merely a means to changing the future through the world-shaping power of narrative.

“I didn’t understand that my value system—my great inheritance—was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress. Things were easier for me than for my mother; things were easier for me than for my father; my drugs were cleaner, my goods were abundant, my rights were enshrined. Was this not progress? I struggled with the same bafflement over history, which I still understood in rigid, narratively linear terms.”

This realization, which the narrator develops in hindsight, demonstrates the conclusions that can be drawn from the text’s portrayal of perceived progress, which form the basis for two prominent themes. Her “enshrined” rights (as a woman and due to her multiethnic heritage) and her value system (not being a far point on an empirical line) illustrate The Nonlinear, Subjective Nature of Social Change. Her better drugs and abundant goods contrast with the near and distant future, in which the world is warring over depleted resources because of The Devastating Consequences of Technological Progress.

“‘Oh, it’s not the century, it’s the soul,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Her “hereness” and “thereness” have no consistency, no continency, and she is beginning to slip out of time. It is unusually accelerated in Seventeen-ninety-three. She does not even try to bring her “thereness” in line, you see. Because she is grieving, and grief will always take one out of time.’”

The concepts of hereness and thereness help illustrate the comparison between time travelers and refugees. For expats, a change in time, not geographical location, creates the most alienation. Nevertheless, feeling like an outsider, unable to connect with their origins and inhabit their true identities, can be extremely harmful. The Ministry expects the expats to adjust and blend in with modern society, just as many refugees and immigrants are expected to relinquish their native cultures. The perception of forced assimilation is virtually the same.

“This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”

The narrator begins to grapple with the consequences of her choices, a universal conflict that often inspires time-travel narratives. Time, in this story, assumes symbolic meaning that subtly acknowledges the impossibility of undoing what’s been done, even as it depicts humans using a time machine. In this passage, the narrator accepts that with every difficult choice, one creates a path (a new timeline, perhaps) that must then play out.

“Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road. I wonder what the winter of the bridge year would have looked like if I hadn’t frosted Simellia, or if I’d been less skeptical of Quentin. I hardly dare linger on the ways I changed Graham, forcing him down strange tracks as I uttered a new word or concept with accidentally Edenic significance.”

This passage further develops the narrator’s thoughts about her choices and her inability to undo them. The novel ends with her writing a note to her past self about her mistakes, but she doesn’t specify them. As the story’s events unfold, the narrator sometimes questions her motives, never knowing for sure whether she’s making the right choice, just like in real life. Readers thus may not follow which choices she later sees as wrong. This passage offers guidance for recognizing choices the narrator made for selfish or cowardly reasons and will later regret.

“You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression.”

This observation about the nature of mistakes and hindsight develops the novel’s use of time and time-travel symbolism. If time symbolizes the choices one makes, which inherently have consequences and can’t truly be undone, then time travel symbolizes learning from mistakes and forgiveness. The narrator notes that one doesn’t learn from being marginalized, suggesting her belief that perspective and hindsight are necessary to metaphorically time travel by learning from the past.

“At the crux of all the time-travel hypotheses was the question: How do you measure a person?”

The symbolic meaning of time and time travel are central concepts in the novel, so many passages contribute to understanding how they operate in the story and what they mean outside the story. By narrowing all the time-travel hypotheses to this one simple question, the narrator reinforces the idea that time symbolizes the inventory of an individual’s choices, which the author might espouse as the most accurate measure of a person.

“Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future. Believe me when I say that time-travel taught me that.”

The narrator makes this observation after Graham learns about the Holocaust and asks, “How could this have been allowed to happen?” (204). She struggles to answer: There is no good answer. She relates a memory about a monk who suggested that the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide were karmically responsible for what happened to them. The narrator recognizes the profoundly complex nature of history and cause-and-effect, which negates any feasible way to undo (or even rationalize) horrendous events. Only learning remains.

“After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that.”

The narrator’s thoughts about her mother’s life in Cambodia and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime recur often in the narrative, despite their having little concrete or practical relevance to her work with the Ministry and the expatriation project. The topic’s prominence indicates it must be important to the character as a core part of her identity. Though she never lived in Cambodia or under the Khmer Rouge, she’s affected by its generational trauma. She’s still working out what this means for her life.

“‘What did you usually do when you, er, if you got interested in a woman?’

‘I would break into a cold sweat and put myself on the nearest ship.’”

Graham’s attitudes toward romantic relationships develop an assessment of how social conventions regarding romance and sex have changed since the 19th century. On a more personal level, his inexperience with women develops his character and adds tension to his interactions with the narrator. As with most other topics, he addresses this topic through witty banter that adds to his charm and infuses the text with humor.

“He combed his fingers through my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.”

This evocative foreshadowing does more than merely hint at what’s to come. It also uses pathos to invest readers in the narrator’s happiness, making them care about what happens next. The author’s descriptive language vividly depicts the scene and the intensity of the narrator’s emotions, creating an exhilarating yet apprehensive mood.

“Certainly Adela’s insistence that we were special in some way tallied with my experience of being in love.”

As an empowered woman in a position of authority and also a woman in love, the narrator navigates the line between romance genre tropes and feminist literature expectations. Often struggling to find a balance, she’s racked by insecurity. Nevertheless, the authentic portrayal of a woman in both roles suggests that the tension between romance literature and feminist literature represents a false binary.

“The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. I’d seen it happen around my own life.”

The narrator’s lyrical description adds depth to the expats’ humanity. By comparing their loss and loneliness to that of humans throughout history, she makes their science-fictional existence relatable. This passage is a good example of how the author uses figurative language to create moods that enhance the reading experience.

“I suppose I mean to say that I’d betrayed him, because he’d been told I was his anchor, and instead I insisted he become mine. Betrayed him in other ways too, of course, by keeping secrets from him and reporting on him. But that was all in the original job description.”

In this passage, the narrator recognizes why her actions toward Graham were a betrayal, even though she merely followed her heart and never intended to hurt him. Additionally, she explains why, in her view, starting a romantic relationship with him was more of a betrayal than lying to him and violating his privacy. This recognition, and the complicated nature of their relationship throughout the book, portrays relationships as potential conflicts in and of themselves.

“‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘I made you my life.’

‘And in the heat of your obsession,’ he said, ‘did it occur to you to remember that I am a person too?’”

Only in hindsight does the narrator recognize that her infatuation and romance with Graham were unhealthy and selfish. She pressured him into intimacy he wasn’t comfortable with and made him assume he could trust her. At the same time, she abetted the Ministry in violating his privacy and restricting his freedom. His question here is an allegation that the narrator treated him inhumanely out of self-interest and a lack of empathy.

“I became obsessed with control, which I suppose is another way of saying I wanted command of the narrative. Graham hadn’t been all wrong when he said I’d been trying to shape him. How could I resist it? He came to me as a story.”

The narrator’s need for control stemmed from her experiences as the child of an immigrant who needed help navigating her new country. She grew up, she says, “half parented and half parenting” (292). Taking control of every situation, and thus commanding the narrative, became a coping mechanism. In the story’s dramatic present, the narrator’s life becomes a constant state of both concrete and existential crises, so her coping mechanism is always in effect. It’s harmful to Graham, yet it’s an understandable flaw in a complex character.

“I thought I might get another You’re a stupid girl, but Adela just looked sad. ‘Time,’ she said, ‘is a limited resource. Like all of our resources. You only get to experience your life once. And you can travel through time, a little, though it’s like smoking cigarettes: the more you do it, the greater risk you’re at from death by its effects.’”

The narrator expects Adela to call her stupid because Adela has previously been condescending about the narrator’s naiveté. This condescension is ironic, given the disastrous effects of Adela’s choices. More importantly, this quote helps illuminate what time and time travel symbolize, and how they contribute to the book’s message about the risks of obsessing over one’s mistakes and trying to undo them, rather than learning from them and moving on.

“You let him off the hook again and again. I watched you. He came up through the empire. He believed in it. And you did too. I read your file. The things that happened to your family. That’s why you joined up. Getting behind the biggest bully in the playground.”

Simellia says this to the narrator. It offers keen insight into what motivates the narrator’s choices; an important aspect of her characterization that even she isn’t fully aware of. The metaphor of getting behind the bully in the playground aptly describes the narrator’s relationship with the Ministry, a government entity that symbolizes abuse of power.