“In answer to your question, I’m the Vice Secretary of Expatriation.”
“And they are expats from…?”
“History.”
“Sorry?”
Adela shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.”
Kaliane Bradley’s Hugo-nominated novel jumps right into it with our narrator – an industrious government employee with a British father and a mother who fled Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge – accepting a promotion for a job so secret she wasn’t even allowed to know what it was until her acceptance interview. What she finds out, eventually, is that she’ll be working with refugees. From time. Specifically, she’s assigned as a “bridge” to a British commander from a failed Arctic exploration in 1847, but in all there are a total of five people who have been dragged out of their century.
Bradley explains the mechanics of time-travel in the most efficient way possible, by not explaining it. Our narrator (no, we don’t ever learn her real name), doesn’t understand the science and knows you won’t either, so never mind. And you also don’t need to worry about what removing someone from the past will do to the present, because they were taken just before they were about to die. Plague, war, trapped in the ice for two years along with a ship’s worth of fellow explorers, history has them all safely “dead”.
The narrator and her fellow bridges are being introduced to their assignments after a few weeks of gentle explanations, so there’s no scenes of a shivering wreck trying to ward off “demons” or someone trying to escape their captors (again). All the bridges have to do now is provide round-the-clock companionship and help them adjust to the 21st century and everything that comes with it.
And it looks like the author had so much fun doing this, thinking through all the ways that a person from history would react to, well, anything from the modern era. Take something like the television. Once you’ve explained what it is and the bare bones of the way it works, what would be the reaction to it if the person watching is from a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Four hundred? How would world history make any kind of sense? (The British Empire collapsed? And what do you mean by “First” World war?) How long would it take to teach someone the interaction between races and genders when even the words have changed? Imagine what it would be like for someone with the social mores of the 1600’s to find out the existence of something called “Tinder”.
And it’s not just their reaction to our era. Someone from the sixteenth century would find someone from the early twentieth century exactly as baffling as someone from the fifteenth century would find a traveler from the mid seventeenth century. If you’re getting lost, there’s a snippet from a government report on page 43 that lists the name and source year for each one of the expats, and I suggest you bookmark it. Characters can be referred to by their name – first or last – or officially by their entire year, or affectionately by the last two digits. “Forty-seven.” “Sixteen.” The interactions between all of the expats never stop being fascinating. There’s so much packed into even the smallest throwaway comments, like 1847 getting a new appreciation for what 1916 went through when 1665 recommends he watch a movie made over a hundred years after the events in the film take place.
Our point-of-view character gets to know all of the expats in various degrees, but her main focus is Commander Graham Gore, only survivor (now) of the Franklin expedition. Intelligent, charming, plays the flute, loves to hunt, no interest in television but thinks having the ability to play back any song, anywhere, as many times as you want is amazing. He’s a little nonplussed at a London with so many different races and women running around having jobs and showing off their calves and shoulders, but the important thing is he’s never shitty about it. What you get with Gore is a man who’s willing to see that everything is changed and to try to find his own place in it without being judgy about how things aren’t the way they used to be. And even though he’s completely under the control of a government bureaucracy that knows everything about him, he’s got a very subtle sense of humor and isn’t at all afraid to call people out.
“You–knew I played the flute?”
“A couple of extant letters from you and referring to you mention it.”
“Did you read the letters that mentioned my mania for arson and my lurid history of backstreet goose-wrestling?”
I turned around and stared at him.
“A joke,” he supplied.
“Ah. Are there going to be a lot of those?”
“It depends on how often you spring on me such statements as ‘I have read your personal letters.'”
God, I love the dialog in this book. Bradley describes the setting and the weather of a quickly-crumbling climate in ways that are absolute poetry. (“Navy-blue nights wrapped the glum and shortening days like a bandage.” Or, “The light was even and soft, like carefully sifted flour.”) By contrast the dialog is snappy and hilarious. The author can write entire scenes where you only know what’s happening action-wise by what’s happening in the conversations: the “Ow!” and “Fuck!” of a hand-to-hand combat training that’s not going well. A few of the expats are fully aware of how ridiculous their situation is, so you get wonderful commentary about things like airport security, or several of them getting as giggly and annoying about a museum visit as a group of bored teenagers. One of my favorite sections involved Gore attempting to ride a bike, failing the first couple of times, and getting salty about it.
“I would like to remind you that I am an officer of the Royal Navy.”
“You’re on the floor is what you are.”
“My captain commended me for gallantry at Aden.”
“On the floor. With the bugs.”
So you’ve got a man-out-of time with genteel Victorian manners and an open mind, being watched over and introduced to a whole new world by a woman who’s studied every scrap of information she can pull out of the archives. Of course she falls in love with him. And of course she’s too much inside her own head (not to mention the fact that she’s having to report everything he does to a government agency) to actually act on the feelings she doesn’t want to admit she has. At least not right away It’s the perfect set-up for a rom-com: months of will-they/won’t-they mixed in with utterly perfect evenings with the other expats, attempts to cook Cambodian food, 1916 and 1847 going on a hunting trip, Christmas get-togethers, 1665 with her eternally-appealing way of talking obsessing about old Simpsons episodes…
…you can almost miss the point where we start wondering why a secret government agency would spend endless resources to pull people out of time just to teach them about social media, smartphones, and TV dramas.
When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn’t see it.
This is not a fluffy cozy fantasy, no matter how much fun it is to read about an expat learning what an internet search is for. These characters are 99% trauma. The chapters alternate between the present day, and the very short segments about Gore on his final mission in the 1800’s, where we see what it looks like to spend two years dying of frostbite, starvation, and scurvy. Our narrator’s trauma is more removed, and she’s more shaped by it than Gore because the slaughter that her mother escaped is baked into her entire childhood. And in many ways the worst part for both of them is not knowing exactly what happened. You can know your comrades, or your family members, are dead, but your grief is poisoned by all the suffering that you have to imagine they went through.
Graham Gore’s bridge has spent her life stuck between two nationalities, always wondering if she’s making the right choices, or saying the right things. And then she does the wrong thing. Repeatedly. She tells the reader she’s going to do the wrong thing, without letting us know what that is. We only know a vague shape of how things are going to go very badly while we watch her job become become more dangerous, more paranoid. Her choices keep multiplying why she desperately tries to figure out what the right thing to do is, who she can afford to betray the least, while her superiors decided how much collateral damage they feel like avoiding.
And then of course we’ve got the whole element of time travel. One of the things I love the most about time-travel stories is all the variations on the rules. We’ll never know the science behind it, but Bradley’s version of time-travel has all kinds of interesting side-effects. And watching it in motion is surprisingly terrifying, a technology we can’t understand but which feels evil and vicious. Almost as horrifying as what entire countries can do to undesirables, something which feels pretty damn relevant right about now. (The Reading Group Guide suggests a discussion about why the travelers here are called “expats” instead of “refugees” or “immigrants”, and how language is used to determine how someone is treated. Good. QUESTION.) It’s not a happy book, but the author does manage to leave us with a tiny speck of something that isn’t despair. Also a new way of looking at time travel that feels very much like an assignment for, well, everyone.