Hi there, It's Daniel James and I'm back to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast. Hosted by Editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. This week, Michael is chatting with best selling debut author Kelly Anne Bradley. As always, Michael is here to tell me a little bit more about
the episode. Hello Michael, Daniel, Hello again. So Michael. Your guest on today's episode is Kelly Ane Bradley, whose debut novel The Ministry of Time became an absolute sensation when it was released last year. Why do people fall in love with this book?
Look, I'm gonna say right from the outset, I'm a sucker for a time travel narrative, whether it's TV, movie or book. I love a good time travel story. Kate Atkinson's life after Life is terrific. Time traveler's wife is brilliant. Like anytime there's what doctor who refers to as whibley wobbly timey wymy stuff, I'm there for it. And so I was immediately curious to see what the Ministry of Time had on the cards. And part of what's so good about it is that it's delivered pretty straight. You know,
it accepts its reality. Here's what's possible in terms of time travel, and here's how government bureaucracy acts as a kind of overlay over the whole thing. Plus it's a spy book and a romance novel and a book for people who are horny about Arctic explorers. So really, if that doesn't tick one of your boxes, I don't know what I can say.
And for those of us who perhaps have the ministry of time and our not stands, but haven't had the chance to dive in, can you briefly set it.
Up for us?
Yeah, no worries, although, as with all things time travel, it's slightly complicated. But the book centers on a young woman who's a civil servant and she's been offered a chance to move across to a new government ministry, and there they gather people who are kind of unstuck from time through this new technology. They're appearing in the present day. They're named for the period that they came from, and
they're referred to as ex pats. And this civil servant's job is to be a bridge she has to live with and monitor. One of those expatriates. He's eighteen forty seven and his actual name back before he time traveled to was Commander Graham Gore, a Victorian polar explorer, and he has made the move to the present day and he has to make sense of everything from Spotify to
washing machines to feminism. He chained, smokes inside and kind of gets grumpy trying to discover the new world, and as inevitably happens, the two of them get drawn to each other in a range of ways. It's really a great fun read, and Calayanne explains in this conversation the ways in which it originated out of basically a thought exercise with her friends. We've seen a historical figure, we think he's sexy. Let's write a story that lets a bit of wishful film and happen.
And it goes from there.
Coming up with just a moment hoot and holler for Kellyanne.
Bradley, tell me about your relationship with time travel, because it seems to me that as far as a storytelling convention or a genre trope goes, it is one that is peculiarly characterized by its need for rules and structure and rigidity, and I'm interested in whether that's something that appeals to you and whether it created a challenge for you right out of the gate.
I mean both things. Really, it appealed to me because I think a lot of the stakes don't work without a certain amount of rigidity and without certain rules. I also think this is true of things like human relationships, community interaction, like these things depend on those agreed rules and certain level of stakes. So that definitely appealed to me when I first started writing, because I was more interested in the kind of after effects of having time
traveled than the science of time travel. So I was being a bit vague about exactly how the rules worked, and I got I think it was almost one thousand words from one of my editors in a marginal note, like you have to explain how this works because otherwise it doesn't matter. You can hop back in time and anything could happen, and you could you know there's a timeline, whether everyone is just a flying monkey and everything's absolutely fine. So even though I did, the rules really appealed to me.
I was also messing around with the rules until someone poked me with a stick to make me set them up properly.
It's such a funny thing because the rules matter in an idea's sense, but they matter even more in a narrative sense. Like, as you say, you have to set up the rules so you know where the stakes are. But the other thing that you need to do, and I think all time travel literature to a certain extent has to do, is find its own limitations. How do we ring fence this off so that it doesn't become completely weightless?
Absolutely, because also I think narrative demands a certain amount of linear focus, and I think that things like character progression, narrative progression, emotional progression requires a certain amount of as you say, ring fencing of the timeline. So if you were just throwing people around chaotically, there's nothing really for a reader to hook into. You want to be following
someone watching them bounce around. I mean, maybe Calvino would disagree with me, but certainly for a book like this.
It strikes me that when we talk about rules or structural stuff, the other way to talk about that is the language. Settling on what the kind of a grade language is for an imaginary thing goes a long way to rendering it real. How quickly did the language of the bureaucracy around time travel come to you?
I'm so embarrassed to say very fast. I would say maybe the language of bureaucracy and the language of governmental rules came faster than the big idea stuff about how time travel works and therefore what affect emotional psychological it has on characters. I don't know, there's something dark inside me that is really drawn towards bureaucracy. This is like with John McCarey thing I read. I started being John lacay very very young, before I really understood even the
political context. And when you read something like Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, where he's just refusing to explain what he means by the lamp lighters and the scalp punters and circus and the cousins, didn't know what was happening until a second re read when I was much older. But still is having a great time, just a great time.
I think, And I'm glad you mentioned that because it is and you know that's one of the other genre conventions that you play with in this book. But the spy novel is always great for that is the if it asserts a world with a language that feels authoritative enough you go along as a reader. It doesn't matter, you know. It was only listening to an interview with Mick Hare and I discovered that most of his terminology is completely his own fabrication.
The park is not real.
They don't talk about seconds, none of that stuff that he created entirely for the world of the book and just still lives it straight faced enough that it feels like something true.
You've walked into a room where people are talking like this, and you're like, well, I better not a long otherwise they're going to kick me out.
Don't embarrass myself. If I'd be like, oh, I didn't know they were called the dogs.
Then it's just a lie.
Oh my god, it's so good.
There is something about that that's nice. But leaving aside the human element for a moment and leaving inside the polar explorer element for a moment, the kind of overlay of time travel, bureaucracy, and the spy novel in this book.
The interplay is a linguistic one. You know, the ways in which you allow those three things to make sense and function relies entirely on that shared language and that reasoning, and maybe no more acute than the idea of the people who are out of their own time zones being talked about as expatriates.
Absolutely, so that's a very deliberate political choice on the part of the ministry to call them expatriates instead of refugees. And I do think what the ministry are very insistent on doing. One the first things they start doing is making sure the experts are using correct language, both to describe the world around them but also in terms of politically correct language. And I think there's two things that
play for me there. One is like the quite hopeful, I think and quite positive idea that we create communities by having a shared understanding of the world we're living in in a vocabulary that we can all easily refer to. And so as a result, our sense of self is kind of built out of these words that were given
for ourselves. So there's the ex about Maggie Margaret Kemball, who's from the Great Plague of London, who is given for the first time in her life the word lesbian, and it's wonderful for her, it's really liberating and really affirming. Then there is also institutional language, which is often taking the language of radical systems, radical responses to injustice, and institutionalizing and defanging them. So it becomes about language that
is correct rather than language that is empathetic. And I find there's an exciting contrast for me there, because in one case, you've been given new language and new taxonomies that are really liberating, and then you're being given new languages and new taxonomies that are actually quite deadening and are encourage you to think of yourself as ticking boxes rather than actually thinking about the reality of the people.
And that for me is like the big tension in the ministry and the big tension for the narrator.
It is, I mean, the easy temptation is to look to or Well for that example of the way in which an institution imposes language to deaden but also to other I think that relationship between those who are of the project, whether it's the colonial project, whether it's the corporate project, those who belong and those who don't, and to create an outsider status through language.
Yeah, absolutely, And I really like the all Wel comparison because the Ministry of Truth is obviously one of the reasons this book is called the Ministry of Time is because I was thinking about that. It's never actually called the Ministry of Time in the book. It is just the title of the book.
Espe they will play it against Sam thinks they've heard it.
It's not that they haven't heard it. They haven't heard it.
So how then do you build a protagonist as you have with the Bridge, who is part of that system? How do you find the human elements of a character who chooses to speak and chooses to kind of live in a system that kind of sends off the corners of that humanity.
She was such an interesting character to develop because when I first started writing the book, she was nobody. She was nothing, She was just a cipher. And in fact, the whole first version of the book was written in the second person, so that my friends who were reading it, it was just as if they were they were experiencing this funny game about living with a polar explorer from nineteenth century. First of all, my agent said, I'm begging you not to write a book in the second person. I can't.
I'm not coward to sell Your agent's a coward. I'm going to say it right now.
Chris, if you're listening, please don't fire me. But he also pointed out that like a love story where one half of the love story is just a nothingness, and a story about complicity where one half of that is just nothing, it's just a blank space. It's just not very satisfying. So when I started to write her, I started to think about what in her past would mean that First of all, she's attracted to the idea of Victorian man, which is very separate to falling in love
with the person Graham Gore. He is a person, he's like, you know, he's a full human being. But attracted to the idea of this Victorian hero, this dashing Victorian explorer. And then what in her background would make her interested in both afraid of and attracted to the kind of control the ministry promises. And I often use the word control rather than power, because I don't think it's so much that she wants to wield power as she wants to be in control. She wants to be in control
of a narrative. She wants to be in control of the way the language that about her is used, and in control of any given situation that she enters. So when I was writing her, and I was thinking about the fact that Graham Gore is entering a world where the British Empire has collapsed, and that was for him his kind of driving force. It's a background, that's all. It's not worth acknowledging because it was just it would have just been over the Navy like a tea cozy.
I thought maybe it would be interesting for her to be British Bermese or British Indian, someone who has family who were formerly colonized subjects and was a mixed race, white passing person as I am, and therefore has like a complicated relationship both to how they're perceived, how they're talked about, and how they might be received by structural power. And then I thought this, I'm just being really disingenerous. I'm just getting in my own way here. I'm British Cambodian.
I know that's not like a former British imperial colony. It's a French was part of the French Empire. But it just seems like I am trying to make things difficult for myself when I know what I could write well is a British Cambodian person.
Do you think that trying to make things difficult for yourself was about assuring a raid that projected autobiographical angst or kind of personal storytelling, and it deliberately loathe to open the door to that kind of reading.
That is exactly exactly why I was getting in my own way like that, because yeah, I didn't want the bridge to be She obviously isn't me. I've never alas, I've never lived with her.
I was going to say, the element of wish fulfillment means that as soon as the bridge is rades you at all, it's like, oh, well, this is just a personal fantasy.
This is just a personal fantasy where I get to be complicit with the British cum which I love doing. Obviously, we all love doing.
It as sacred drain. We're a Straylan's that's.
All we live.
Yeah, I was. I was really really resistant to that. And over the course of the like the editing the book because of what it was published, was I think draft nine of all the edits, there was putting things in about Cambodia, taking things out, working out what of my family story I wanted to draw on what I really didn't what should be completely fictionalized. My mother occasionally says,
you know, it didn't happen to me like this. It's like, yes, I know, it happened to like this to a fictional character. This isn't you.
After the break Callayne chairs the audience she writes for and explains why Terry Pratchett is so important to both her reading and her writing life.
We'll be right back.
I read another interview with you where you mentioned that one of the talkings to you got from your editor was that you needed to take yourself, you needed to take the work more seriously. I want to know what that is and what that lack of seriousness was. Was it a confidence thing or was it a defense mechanism that as long as you were playing on the page the stakes were lower. As long as you were trying to do something serious there was something at risk.
This is such a good question. It's something that I've been asking myself quite a lot over the course of you know, I'm here for the Melbourne It's Festival, the Sydney Writers Festival, the Opening Writer's Festival. You know, I go up on stage in front of all these people who I've been seeing much bigger audiences than I've ever had in the UK, and I talk as if I shouldn't be there, or I'm slightly embarrassed to be there, and my imposter syndrome is just like coming out of
my ears. And each time I do it, I think, I don't know why I keep doing this. It doesn't make people like me more. It's actually very unnecessary, but I can't stop doing it at the moment, and I
keep on trying to pull it back. It was the same with the book that I was insistent, partly because it came out of such a place of joy and a kind of playfulness, and I was writing a playful thing that became serious for friends who I didn't feel would tell me that what I was doing was cringe and silly to take this game seriously and to start
thinking more seriously about what the stakes were. As soon as I started to professionalize, what was that a game just for friends again, I had that immediate instinct like, Oh, someone's going to find this a bit silly. Someone's going to think fantasy wish performent, this is really boring, this is silly. I don't need to hear what this woman
wants to do with this frozen dead guy. But each time that I kind of ran across that in me mentally, I was being received by people who were interested, who were interested in the work, who were interested in how it might develop.
Well's I mean, That's why I fixate on the You described the ways in which this book's origins were a shared game with friends, kind of shared pursued, and so those readers weren't an abstract group of readers or of faceless readers. There were people you knew, who, presumably you were trying to delight and amuse.
That's the only thing I want. I wanted them to hoot and holler. That was my entire intention for the first draft.
Doesn't seem like you've unlocked something slightly important. I think from a ridally perspective, is about the reality of that reader, rather than the abstraction of that reader.
Yeah, the abstraction of the reader who might receive this well or might receive this badly, rather than the friend who is going to read me in good faith and trusting me. I had an interesting conversation with Tory Peters,
author of stag Dance and De Transition Baby. I was talking about my second book, which I've panned in and which has been quite a painful process, and which has received quite severe notes as severe as a you know, no editor is ever going to tell there are authors that they're an idiot and that nothing they've written is worthwhile. But it has had to have its publication date moved so that I can do edits. But I was saying, you know, it's just been I was doing it again.
They're like, oh, it's terrible. I'm just a very silly person. And she said, from what I understand, you wrote the first book for friends, and now it sounds like you've been trying to write the second book to please this abstract idea of the follow up reader for ministry. I think you need to go back and write it for friends again. And it's sort of ridiculous if it hadn't occurred to me to just think of it like that,
Because it's true. I think I need to go back to just thinking about the maybe five people who I would show it to in the first place, rather than the people who may or may not be disappointed by a second book.
Now, arguably the most scandalous thing you've done in Ministry of time is you've written a book where you've made smoking sexy again. Ah, Like, decades of people being right, no it's not sexy, it's not cool, you shouldn't do it.
And then you're like, Okay, so I've got this charming.
Arctic explorer who is just relentlessly smoking and it's kind.
Of hat Also, I wrote it during so in twenty twinty one, where you know, we were still more or less in lockdown in the UK, and I, yeah, I really wanted a cigarette. It's one of those fascinating things that is both terrible and might kill you. And there's no such thing as like you can't have a neutral amount of nicotine. You gotta have a neutral amount of
tar in your lungs. Also, it's great if you are at a party and you know, no one really smokes indoors anymore, if you just want to be like, I've got to go outside and have a cigarette and then you don't have to talk to people for the length of the cigarette except for other people in the smoking area who are your kindred spirits.
Yeah, I feel like we've really broken important ground on this podcast. Absolutely, But it does, Like as much as that's a very funny, very specific thing, it does get to the heart of something I really love in this book that is very deliberate which is thinking about different social moras in different times and the ways in which
they land so differently. It's one thing to think of an idealized Victorian hero who's a particular kind of stoic and kind of soulful and all these things at once, but then to think about the politics of the day and the way they probably played out, and the assumptions and the baseline chauvinism and racism and unthinking bigotry that is bolted on. How important was it to you that you weren't actively ahistorical.
It was so important. It's actually quite funny to remember how important it was to me, and how deranged I became desperately trying to imagine what it would have been like for this, for Graham Gore specifically, but to lesser extent also the other characters, how it would have been like to experience the twenty first century. Like I was really taking this experiment very seriously, taking this game very seriously.
I was, you know, I was doing things like reading this enormous book about the Victorian home because I wanted to just imagine what the curtains would have looked like, what the flooring would have looked like, and just how a house would have felt different to a man walking out of Victorian England into twenty first century London, just how his body would have reacted differently to the weight
of the clothes. Clothes used to be much heavier and much denser, it was colder, and they didn't have kind of modern innovations with textiles. But also things like being interested in British polar expiration as I was, as I am does eventually mean you have to admit to yourself that what you're interested in is an imperial project. There is no good reason for those men to have been
in the Arctic or Antarctic. There's no good reason for them to have landed in the Inuit homelands and died there in droves, just like for stupid reasons, for stupid reasons that were never useful in fact for the Empire, because the Northwest Passage was not traversible, was just a
racist project. When you are confronted with that, I think you can either say, well, I'm different, I'm different and my interest is actually really good, or you can be willing to interrogate why you might be interested and where the friction lies. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would be received by these people who I was studying with deep fascination and thinking of as fully rounded humans who had different responses to being in
the Arctic, for whom their deaths were tragic. They were completely preventable. They shouldn't have been up there, but it was tragic. It's tragic when someone dies in awful circumstances. Nevertheless, and the idea of a Victorian man being presented with a mixed race woman who has a job, he still would have done some real spicy microaggressions.
I mean, you know.
Of course, the narratu of the Bridge also gets it wrong because she's so institutionalized, and again her ideas are more about being correct than being empathetic, and so she's teaching himself that isn't quite right. And he's like, I don't, I don't really understand, because what you're saying things to contradict the world were actually in Yeah, that was a
lot of fun. Yeah, I just don't think it would have been interesting to me to have Graham Gore, as you know, turning off to me like I actually have always sort of feminism was brilliant in my heart. It's always been the case.
But also as far as romance genre, trope Sky, you actually need that person with whom you disagree or you have a fundamentally different worldview. Part of the friction of that kind of mounting desire comes precisely from the ways in which he is alien.
Absolutely, And I think this is this is the thing about romance, right, There has to be a reason that they don't immediately make out. Now that now that we're in a in a world where it is possible to just swipe right on someone, meet them immediately, like them, that's it. There was There was no friction, there was no tension, there was no difficulty to sustain a romance novel. There does have to be that. There has to be something in the way of them.
You've worked in publishing for years. There is clearly an intimate relationship between your reading and your writing. Tell me why Terry Pratchett is such an important writer to you? Wow?
Where do I begin?
So? I first started reading Pratchett entirely by accident when I was nine or ten, because I picked up a copy of Interesting Times actually, which is for anyone who isn't familiar with the Discord series, And Terry Pratchett is quite late on in the Discworld series, talks about characters who have already been established very much earlier on in the series, and is the kind of in the middle of a storyline kind of book. But I was very attracted to the bright colors and of the cover I
started reading it. I didn't really understand what's going on. But he's just he's so funny. He doesn't patronize a reader, he doesn't talk down to them, but he does expect you to keep up. He expects you to be in on the joke, make the joke, and he expects you to be in on it. And that's such a deliciously welcoming thing, especially when you're a ten year old girl.
You know.
I do remember one time I met him to get the truth his twenty fifth Discworld novel signed, and he just knew exactly how like a slightly cookie I think it would have been twelve by the twelve thirteen, how a slightly kooky teenager wanted to be spoken to. He was just a very like empathetic man. The thing I like about the Discworld series is both that they are
like just very funny. He was very, very funny. He used a humor like a you know, he could play a humorous joke like a trumpet, and he could use it to make a very serious point. I liked that they were funny. I liked that they were also very serious, which is not to say that they were not funny in places, but rather than that, he took his characters seriously. He took his characters seriously and their realities and the
responses that they would be engendering in a reader. And I think he took his readers very seriously as well.
Actually, what, as a rioter do you you've taken from him, given that he was such a formative writer.
For you, partly that a sense of joy is going to compel both the reader but also the writer. I really think he enjoyed writing his books. I really hope so that joy is a perfectly valid and perfectly brilliant way to be launched into a story. And also the funniness can be serious, that humor can be serious, and that it isn't lesser and you don't have to apologize for being a humorous writer. You can, in fact have something serious to say and still be very funny.
Yeah.
No, I think that's right, And I think for me, the other thing to come back to the structure of time.
Travel or whatever is.
He was very good at having set up an entire world with its own internal logic, its own traditions, and presenting them in a way that was matter of fact. If he wasn't interested in an element, he wouldn't over explain it, but he would set up the rules have them be there as the underlying reality. There's no imposter syndrome in Approachet book.
No, absolutely not. He knows what he's doing, and he knows that you're in. You know you're in. You feel like you're in safe hands with the Pratchet book. Actually, this is something I think about with magic, the way he dealt with magic, which feels like a really pragmatic and thoughtful series of limitations, because quite often he says that they used to be raw magic, when sorcerers existed and anyone could do anything, just throwing fireballs across the world.
In fact, now in what is contemporary discworld, magic is very limited. There's a limit that you can do with it because it is a depleting resource. And there is like a very clear parallel to the way we use technology in the way we think of technology with the way he treats magic. It has unfortunately slightly changed the way I read other books with magic, and because every time I see someone who's just a wizard doing magic, I'm like, where is where is that energy coming from? Like, what's
going on? What are the rules with magic in your in your universe? Explain it to me?
And like in a bureaucred it's just swinging into action. All that a pin and a pair. Then you like, well this won't do.
Sorry, we have to tax this and there are tarifs on this one.
Sorry, you are misbehaving and we are going to ride you up. It's the only way. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you very much for having me.
Cally Ane Bradley's best selling novel, The Ministry of Time is available everywhere now.
Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. As always, if you want to dive in further into the show, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than ninety episodes and they read this archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.