Graham Gore, what radicalized you?
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and its moments of truth.
THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!!!
I’m fixated on how The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley centers The Moment of Truth. Is this a plot device that Bradley wanted to satirically play with (by overdoing it) or is it something more that?
Almost every character in this book experiences a radicalizing moment, but no one more so than our time-traveling heartthrob Graham Gore, who hails from 1847. As he acclimates to the modern world, he obviously has to learn a lot about history. Turns out, there are three pivotal world events that could radicalize him and thereby change the course of history: “Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and the Twin Towers.”1
We don’t get to see Option 1: The Twin Towers play out, but we learn of it through Adela. In Option 1, Graham Gore accidentally learns about 9/11 from her, which puts him on a path of extreme nationalism. He joins the Ministry of Time, ascends the ranks, becomes a tyrannical, top-level British bureaucrat, and ends up as an architect of the world’s climate catastrophe. He is a reason The Global South and all its people are utterly destroyed by 2200 from sea level rise, resource wars, disease, and starvation.2 We know about this version of Graham Gore because three futurists, Salese and The Brigadier (both from the 2200s) and Adela (from 2040s), go back in time to the present day to neutralize Graham and nip his legacy in the bud.
In Option 2: Auschwitz, which is the one we are reading, Graham Gore learns about Auschwitz, which puts him on a much different path. He starts turning into a James Bond-esque rogue, working against The Ministry of Time from the inside. He distrusts the systems that allowed The Holocaust to happen and is radicalized in a different way. Ultimately, he saves who he can and goes to live off the grid in Alaska.
Option 3: Hiroshima is the one we don’t see in the book. But we have to assume it’s happening in some parallel universe. I do wonder, What happens when Graham Gore learns about Hiroshima? How does this knowledge affect him and the world?
I usually feel very meh about stories featuring average white men being The Chosen One and saving or dooming the world, but I find The Ministry of Time’s take pretty interesting. For one, his fate is whimsically, even disgustingly, flimsy! What do you mean his whole life AND THE FATE OF THE WORLD are dependent on the narrator’s faux pas? Oops, she mentions 9/11. He’s a tyrant. Oops, she mentions Auschwitz. He defects. Oops, she mentions Hiroshima. He [insert endgame here].
Here’s how I see it: Graham’s storyline scratches an annoying itch. It’s mildly satisfying to witness a woman’s casual words have enormous power over a man because he is actually, really listening to her. I like the wry humor, fantasy, and truth of that setup. It seems to say, if men just wholeheartedly listened to women, what a world this could be. (But, yeah, we knew that already.)
BOOK EVIDENCE: ADELA AND THE NARRATOR FIGURE OUT HOW EASILY GRAHAM IS SWAYED
from Chapter 8 of The Ministry of Time, page 265
Adela froze, the edge of her hand arrested mid-strike.
“What?”
“I said the word ‘Auschwitz’ out of context and he spent all night looking up the Holocaust.”
“You didn’t tell him about the attack on the Twin Towers?” asked Adela. She seemed genuinely confused. Her hand hovered in midair. I hesitated, then decided this must mean the sparring was over, and relaxed.
“No. God, can you imagine? He’d already spent 1839 blowing up the sultanate at Aden. I’m not sure how much I’d trust him to keep the whole war on terror thing in, like, non-racist proportion.”
⚠️“Yes,” said Adela, in a flaking voice. “If he’d come to the news abruptly, he would have converted to the Ministry on the spot.”
⚠️ She met my eye and added, “I imagine.”
Slowly the look went rancid.
Where things get infinitely more interesting in The Ministry of Time, but regretfully do not get explored as much, is that Graham Gore is not the only Chosen One. Did you catch that Simellia is a Chosen One figure too?
I am struck but not surprised by Simellia in contrast to Graham. Graham is a white, Victorian man, and Simellia is a Black, modern woman. He enjoys getting to be fun and unserious. He’s a Chosen One we get to see in his off time, when he’s charming, silly, lovestruck, impressionable, and a good friend. We don’t really get to see Simellia in her off time. We barely get to see her laugh. “She laughed. Simellia smiled all the time but she almost never laughed, so I remember this moment clearly.”3
What we do see of her: She’s super guarded and grounded. She’s secretly heroic. She has a family (living siblings and parents). She’s the mole. The revolutionary. The rebel. She successfully aids Salese and The Brigadier in the doomed plot to kidnap (or assassinate?) Graham Gore, a risk she takes on to do something (instead of nothing!) after learning what happens to The Global South 200 years in the future.
Even at the end, when it’s clear things are falling apart, Simellia’s character surprised me by not even cracking a tiny bit under the pressure of failing. In fact, I felt like her final words and her trajectory might matter more than anyone else’s in the book. We don’t get to see what plays out for her, but we get a hint of her impact to come— straight from her:
“I’ll tell the truth about what happened here. There will be so many more of me. So many more, you won’t believe it. Your problem always was that you’d given up on other people."
I’m not done thinking about Simellia. I’m still wondering about where she went. What happened to her family. What resources she had. What she will do. If The Ministry finds her. Also, I’m wondering if the narrator could have been a tiny bit more interested in finding some way to support Simellia or at least the things she cared about. All that hush money just rotting away in the narrator’s bank account? She’s likely going to use a chunk of it to run off to Alaska to find Graham and Maggie, but she could do so much better with her time, knowledge of the future, resources, and money. Ugh.
A Must Read
P.S.
wrote piece called “All American fiction is race fiction” that was in mind when I wrote this.from “All American fiction is race fiction” by
Every critic should be sitting with and considering the role of race in the work, asking “raceless” novels about the burden of whiteness on the narrative, calling attention to it not to shame or reduce but to invite discussion and expand the meaning of the text. Good criticism deepens our understanding of the work by layering in meaning and creating new understandings, allows it to fully mature in the cultural consciousness. I hope critics finally, consistently take up this mantle. The work, and we, are better for it.
A Must Listen
P.S.S. I cannot wait to hear
and talk about The Ministry of Time on The Stacks Podcast on January 29th. Save the date! It’s this month’s bookclub pick!
Chapter 3, p 74
Chapter 10, p 310
Chapter 2, p 46
My goodness, I want to read like you when I grow up! In the meantime, I’m grateful that I get to deepen my experience of this book through your engagement with the text!
I love getting to read your thoughts on this one. I think this will impact how J and I talk about the book. You’re fleshing out some of the things I disliked about the book in new ways!