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Tiffany Hansen: You are listening to All Of It here on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Alison Stewart today. The buzzy debut novel, The Ministry of Time, might not have been written if author Kaliane Bradley hadn't fallen a little bit in love with the 19th-century polar explorer named Graham Gore. Gore was a sailor who died on the infamous Franklin expedition in 1847. You might be familiar with the acclaimed FX series The Terror about this very mission.

In Kaliane's new novel, Gore is rescued by time travelers from the future. See, in 21st-century London, they figured out how to remove people who were supposed to die in the past and bring them to the present day. They are called expats. Our narrator is a Cambodian British woman who works for The Ministry of Time as a bridge. Her job is to live with Graham Gore to help him get adjusted to 21st-century life, which can mean anything from showing him what Spotify is to educating him about the world wars. As the two begin to spend a lot of time together, our narrator begins to fall in love.

What is The Ministry of Time really trying to achieve with this expat project? Why have they brought Gore here? Who are these strange duos that are hunting him down? Today is Pub Day for The Ministry of Time, which has already been optioned for television by the BBC [unintelligible 00:01:31] and A24. Author Kaliane Bradley will be speaking at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint on Thursday, but first, she's here in the studio. Kaliane, welcome.

Kaliane Bradley: Hello. I'm so thrilled to be here and to be able to talk about Graham Gore to a bigger audience.

Tiffany Hansen: [chuckles] Yes. All right. Let's talk about the commander, shall we? You became obsessed with him this really from an old photo, correct?

Kaliane Bradley: Absolutely. After I watched The Terror, the TV series that you just mentioned, which is about the Franklin expedition, I was just scrolling on my phone looking up the episode details. I went to Graham Gore's Wikipedia page, and I saw that photo of him. He's so charming. He's very gently smiling, and the description of him makes him sound so competent, so charming, so brilliant. I thought, "God, I bet he'd be nice to have around in a pandemic," which is what I'm in right now.

Tiffany Hansen: Right. Then you went down a little bit of a rabbit hole about polar explorers.

Kaliane Bradley: I did. I didn't know anything about historical polar exploration.

Tiffany Hansen: It's fascinating.

Kaliane Bradley: It's fascinating. It's very alarming. Obviously, the British element of it, the British imperialist element was also very alarming but just the things they did, going out to discover passages they weren't sure existed, going out in these wool uniforms that grew heavy with their sweat. It was brave. It was stupid. They were fascinating, fascinating people.

Tiffany Hansen: We'll talk about the commander more in-depth, but as you looked broadly at these explorers, what kind of a commonality did you find among them?

Kaliane Bradley: That's what's really interesting about all the men who did go to the ends of the earth, to the Arctic and also to the Antarctic, is I think they were all trying to escape something. The more prosaically were trying to escape not being promoted and feeling like they were useless because this was a peacetime Royal Navy so these men weren't doing anything.

They had to join the Discovery expedition, but sometimes they were trying to escape certain pressures, I think, that were on them in Britain at the time. Gore, certainly, his family had moved to Australia, so I think he was trying to escape the sense of not having a home maybe.

Tiffany Hansen: There's an overwhelming sense of adventure, obviously, but there's that great unknown that we don't really have much anymore on earth. How did you bring that sense of adventure and that knowledge that there still is an unknown into the book with him?

Kaliane Bradley: I think I did a lot of reading. I read a lot of old sailors' diaries. I read about a lot of old Victorian letters, which are very annoying to read, by the way, because there was limited papers so they would cross-write them. They'd write vertically, and they'd write horizontally-

Tiffany Hansen: Oh, wow.

Kaliane Bradley: -so quite difficult to decipher.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, that would be hard.

Kaliane Bradley: The way they describe their experiences of the Arctic North, the way they describe the horizons, the way the weather is so different, the sky, the way it makes you think differently, you think differently about your comrades. I thought that was fascinating.

Tiffany Hansen: Tell us about this John Franklin expedition for people who don't really know about it.

Kaliane Bradley: Absolutely. I'm now accidentally an [crosstalk] expat.

Tiffany Hansen: An expat. Yes, that's right.

Kaliane Bradley: The British admiralty sent this expedition to find the Northwest Passage, which was a passage that they hypothesized existed, they weren't sure, that would link the UK to the trading kingdoms of Asia. They sent 129 men and two ships, refitted warships, under Sir John Franklin to find this passage. They thought it would take maybe three years, maybe three years if you had to overwinter, that is, if you had to stay stuck in the ice during the winter. In fact, they just never came back. All 129 men and both ships vanished.

Tiffany Hansen: You mentioned it a little bit, but describe for us in more detail the England and the world that they were leaving behind.

Kaliane Bradley: Absolutely. This happened in 1845, so it was the British Empire at its kind of excitable height. These men really believed that the imperial project was a deeply important thing. They really believed that they were doing something valuable and important and necessary by traveling out to the Arctic without thinking of the people who already live there, whose home it was, and without really thinking about asking them what they thought of the project.

These men carried England in them, I think, all the way out to the Arctic, this idea of England in them as a kind of story that they keep telling themselves.

Tiffany Hansen: How does he-- Well, we can get into that. I want to know how he reconciles that when he comes back to the future, but I want to talk more specifically about his character. You mentioned you're scrolling on your phone, you find him on Wikipedia, and he's got that-

Kaliane Bradley: That little smile. [chuckles]

Tiffany Hansen: -linty smile, which you described so well in the novel. What kind of research did you dive into on him specifically?

Kaliane Bradley: Because there's actually not very much about him, there's only two letters that still exist, both of which are online at arctonauts.com. Apart from that, I had to read the letters of people who had sailed with him, read the diaries of people who had sailed with him. Again, sometimes this very annoying, cross-written Victorian way. I ended up with quite a full portrait because it draws from different points of his life.

I have a sense of what he was like at 26. I have a sense of what he was like at 35. I even have a sense of what he was like very vaguely as a 11-year-old boy when his father, who was a ship's captain, first took him aboard.

Tiffany Hansen: Is there an overwhelming descriptor among those texts of him?

Kaliane Bradley: I think the thing that keeps coming up about him is that he is very kind and very good at his job.

Tiffany Hansen: Can you be kind and lead a polar expedition?

Kaliane Bradley: It's a really fascinating friction in his character, I think one that I really enjoy playing with, bringing him into the 21st century. He was a competent, empathetic colleague. He was very personable. He was very liked by people. Yes, absolutely, he was working on a frightening imperialist project.

Tiffany Hansen: Did he have a sense of humor?

Kaliane Bradley: A very good sense of humor. He once described his commander's wife as living in a swampy house fit only for the habitation of ducks.

Tiffany Hansen: A little Victorian humor for us here. Was it that humor and that complexity that really drove you to him as a central character?

Kaliane Bradley: It was the humor. He's slightly self-deprecating in the letters that we have. I think also it was the sense that he was so competent and so calm. I read the book The Terror. I watched the TV series The Terror during the pandemic where I was not calm and I was not feeling competent. I was just overwhelmed with the thought of, "God, I bet this man would know how to work a VPN," which right now I can't. [chuckles]

Tiffany Hansen: We should dive into the structure of this novel. He's brought back to the 21st century as part of a government program. He's paired up with someone. He's labeled an expat, which we'll get into, but he's paired up with the protagonist in your book as sort of a reminder to be very British about it. Tell us about the protagonist.

Kaliane Bradley: She's a civil servant. She is formerly a translator at the Ministry of Defense, but she's plateaued there. She wants to do something more challenging and also incidentally be paid more because she's quite an ambitious person and she has a very complex relationship with power structures and her place in power structures because she is like me a British Cambodian.

She ends up having quite a complicated relationship necessarily with Gore, with this man who represents this empire that would've exploited her if they'd been born at the same time. Instead, she's in a position of power over him, and I quite enjoyed playing with that.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, I guess it's hard to speculate on what Gore would imagine had he actually been in that situation.

Kaliane Bradley: I think I've been kind to him. I think I've given him a redemption arc that maybe a real Victorian man would not have had.

Tiffany Hansen: I will say from the very beginning of the book, you do like him. You do like him.

Kaliane Bradley: I do. That's a gentle and subtle way to put it. [chuckles]

Tiffany Hansen: They seem to have a shorthand between each other, to me. Where does that come from? It's a knowing understanding, a shorthand that-- A few words.

Kaliane Bradley: I love that sense. I'm glad that really came across. I started writing this book because I wanted to imagine, as a joke for my friends, what would it be like if your favorite polar explorer lived in your house. The thing I was most interested in was carrying on a conversation with this person. You know how when you have a very deep crush on someone and you're always waiting for them to text, and when they email you, when they text you, you read their words again and again and you live in the things they've said.

You can't do that if the man's dead. You have to write his half of the conversation. The book really grew out of these scenes where these two people were just talking to each other, bantering with each other, and being playful with each other.

Tiffany Hansen: The other element of this book that is a challenge is to describe and to understand time travel and how that works. You could have just said, "It's happening. We don't need to describe it. Just know that it works," but you created a little backstory for it around this Ministry of Time. Tell us about that.

Kaliane Bradley: One thing I have to admit I have done is that I've cheated a little bit. I've written a time travel romance that contains almost no time travel on the page. It is set entirely in the 21st century, but I was interested in the idea of time travel as a metaphor for immigration. The expats, as they're called, who were pulled from the past, are really forced refugees. They are pulled into the 21st century.

The narrator, who is a British Cambodian woman, has a family history of refugees, and I was really interested in that parallel of what it's like to adjust to 21st-century Britain as an entirely new country and culture when you can never go home. I was also interested in the idea of history as a narrative, a narrative that we tell ourselves about our cultural identities, our historical identities.

Tiffany Hansen: There is a sense that The Ministry of Time has a hold over these characters because essentially, they do. We brought you here. You're ours now. It's a very limiting feeling for him and for her in some ways. How does that play out?

Kaliane Bradley: The expats are all to begin with, for the first two weeks, they are confined to the house with these bridges, these people who have to look after them and help them adjust to the 21st century, then they're confined to London. Then they are allowed to travel within the British Isles if they have passed the test. I really wanted to replicate that sense of not being sure where you're allowed to go or what you're allowed to do and the rules of a new culture in a new country that haven't been explained to you, that aren't legible to you, and the ways it can sometimes feel very constricting.

Tiffany Hansen: We should say, we've been talking about Commander Gore, he's not the only expat. There are others. How did you get into making sure that they sounded like and acted like the time periods from which they were plucked?

Kaliane Bradley: This was fun for me because it was mainly through reading. One of the expats is called Author Reginald Smythe. He comes from World War I. He's an Edwardian man. I read a lot of E.M. Forster.

Tiffany Hansen: A lot of Edwardian English in your--

Kaliane Bradley: A lot of Edwardian English, absolutely. Harder was Margaret Kemble, who is a woman who was pulled from the Great Plague of London. She's a Jacobean woman. She was a challenge to write, I will admit. I love her, but every scene she took, took forever. I cheated slightly.

Tiffany Hansen: Why? Just a language thing?

Kaliane Bradley: Just trying to get her language right. Trying not to make her sound-- I didn't want her to sound like olde worlde silly. I didn't want her to be incomprehensible, but I wanted the language to be accurate. I ended up reading a lot of Shakespeare comedies, so where the text is in prose rather than iambic pentameter, and just pulling out bits of vocabulary or comparisons that I thought might be useful for Margaret. I didn't use all of them, but that was handy. It does mean that her speech is probably, I will admit, about 50 years out of date, but--

Tiffany Hansen: Well, we won't nitpick that.

Kaliane Bradley: Thank you. [laughs]

Tiffany Hansen: [chuckles] Before I let you go, I just want to touch on, again, this relationship because it is so central to the book between the protagonist and Gore. How would you, in these last seconds we have left, talk to us about the narrator's feelings about Gore's prejudices?

Kaliane Bradley: I think she feels alarmed by them but doesn't want to be alarmed by them, so she smothers them. She wants to find a way to fix him but also fix her own relationship to her fear, I would say.

Tiffany Hansen: The book is The Ministry of Time. The author is Kaliane Bradley. That book is published and out today. Thank you so much for your time.

Kaliane Bradley: Thank you.

 

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