By Kaliane Bradley, a British-Cambodian writer whose first name is pronounced "Cull-yan", this was published in 2024, and is her first novel.

It hit my radar from two directions. It was recommended by Strong Sense of Place, who generally come up with good ideas for books.

The other yes-vote came from Darathey Din, whose Cambodia-focused Substack is always a really good read. She wrote: "While the novel is a concoction of multiple genres set in Britain, the writer did a brilliant job of leaving many Easter eggs of her Cambodian identity throughout the book through one of the main characters who has Cambodian heritage. This weirdly made me feel very full and seen, or should I say represented? Kaliane’s way of dropping the genocide history so nonchalantly in some chapters, or just casually mentioning a few Khmer dishes such as borbor and yao hon, without using the way of capitalising or italicising the words makes me respect her and her writing even more. I find this kind of identity reclamation and representation to be a breath of fresh air."

I'll come back to the Khmer angle in a minute. First, though, the basic story (with no spoilers, because this is a kind of thriller, and you need it to be able to work like that).

We find ourselves in Britain, at some point in the near future. Without dwelling unduly on the environment and the climate, Bradley makes it very clear that things have gone uncomfortably south. They have the occasional "hellheight heatwave" -- "four days at forty-three degrees centigrade, cooler and shorter than the previous year's heatwave". Three months' tropical heat are forecast. Water is rationed, and there are restrictions on how long people can run air-conditioning units.

At one point, our unnamed narrator (a government employee, and British-Cambodian like her author) comments: "The sunlight became acerbic. At midday it shone down vertically, so that, when I ventured onto the pavement, I walked into a world burned clean of shadows. I missed the shadows and the long English rains."

This way of handling climate-change -- understatedly, yet very powerfully -- was one of the things I thought the book did really well. I started writing this post on a blisteringly hot day in Dubai. So hot we were driven inside big-time. Is this what's in store for us all?


I'm not a fan of this cover...

Anyway, we meet the narrator (I'll call her N) when she's being interviewed for a sensitive position that involves shepherding "expats" (these turn out to be people who have died in their own era, but have been extracted from the past via a form of time-travel). "Bridges" like the narrator are supposed to help these flesh-and-blood revenants acclimatize to modern-day life.

Time-travel? Yes...! Bradley toughs it out: "Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel, or read a book with time-travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it."

This is a bit of a cop-out, but it's OK. She doesn't want us to fixate on the mechanisms of the phenomenon. She wants to play with its implications. Fair enough. (People who are more into sci-fi, however, don't like the way the time-travel is handled...)

N's first-person account is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with a third-person narrative focusing on a naval officer, Graham Gore, who perished during John Franklin's doomed attempt to find the Northwest Passage. (The expedition set out in 1845, and by 1850, everyone was dead. The site of the camp was eventually found in 1859.)

Clearly, then, Gore is going to be our lead expat. He was a real person, who lived from 1809 to 1847. And Bradley became "infatuated" with him during the pandemic. "'Did I stare at the picture too long?' Bradley asks herself when we meet in April. 'Maybe I stared at the picture too long.'" Much of the plot, therefore, centres around the love affair that develops between N and Gore (yeah, I know...).


Gore's is one of the lost daguerreotypes of the officers from Franklin's expedition

But he's not the only one who's extracted from the past. Two of the little band of seven die (for the second time, presumably). The others are Margaret Kemble, a woman who met her end in 1665 in the Great Plague of London; Thomas Cardingham, a lieutenant who was killed in the Battle of Naseby in 1645; Arthur Reginald-Smyth, who fell in the Battle of the Somme in 1916; and Anne Spencer, who perished in Robespierre's Paris in 1793.

***

Initially, the time-travel element offers lots of opportunities for humour, as our folks from the past butt up against 21st-century life. Example: "The four of us tried to comfort an upset, disorientated Margaret over Zoom. (The expats were disappointed by how clumsy the software was; they had not expected lags, pixellation or sound issues in this, the brave new future.)"

But it's also a melancholy business. The expats don't understand each other any better than they understand the era they've been abducted into: "Everyone was paddling in their own era-locked pool of loneliness." At one point, Gore, who has on the surface made a good job of "assimilation", but who retains a fondness for his own era that sometimes makes N defensive, comments: "There is no one left in the world who has known me for longer than a few months. I am a stranger in a strange land."

And this is where the idea of time-travel takes on a striking degree of kinship with the experience of migrants. Even that word assimilation is a good pointer: "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."

And it's in this context that we learn a lot about N's experiences as a person who has "the privilege of passing as white", but who experiences countless instances of tactlessness (her sister would call them micro-aggressions) when people realize she's half-Cambodian.


Kampot, Cambodia, 2009

This section is probably the most telling example: "When I first joined the Ministry and they’d pressed me through HR, a woman ran her finger down the column with my family history. ‘What was it like growing up with that?’ she asked. She meant it all: Pol Pot Noodle jokes on first dates, my aunt’s crying jags, a stupa with no ashes, Gary Glitter, Agent Orange, we loved Angkor Wat, regime change, not knowing where the bodies were, Princess Diana, landmines, the passport in my mother’s drawer, my mother’s nightmares, fucking chink, you don’t look it, dragon ladies, fucking paki, Tuol Sleng was a school, Saloth Sar was a teacher, my grandfather’s medals, the firing squad, my uncle’s trembling hands, it’s on my bucket list, Brother Number One, I’ve got a thing for Latinas, the killing fields, The Killing Fields (1984), Angelina Jolie, do you mean Cameroonian? do you mean Vietnamese? will you say your name again for me? I considered. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What was it like growing up without it?’"

Time-travel is also an interesting device for exploring the ubiquitous question: "What do we do with past people's really terrible ideas?" We come across this problem constantly, after all, when we read books from the past -- good books that nevertheless reek of anti-Semitism, or racism, or sexism, or ableism, or homophobia, or whatever.

Gore had taken part in Britain's capture of Aden in 1839. The narrator comments: "So far as I understood the British Empire, other people’s countries were useful or negligible but rarely conceived of as autonomous. The Empire regarded the world the way my dad regards the elastic bands that the postman drops on his round: This is handy, it’s just lying here, now it’s mine." (It's the worldview that a couple of prominent global leaders are now trying to return us to.)

N's response is to try to educate this man who is propounding ideas that were once acceptable and now aren't, so that he comes to embrace a different view: "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."

In a very illuminating interview, Bradley explains: "[N] is interested in love as a kind of colonial exercise in taking over this... untrodden space of this man's mind." The relationship becomes another "colonial exercise" -- until she realizes this is an autonomous individual, who will have to figure things out for himself. Living with "a literal Victorian imperialist" also makes N question "what parts of her identity have been handed down to her, what parts of her identity are things that she has just swallowed, agreed with, become part of a story for". So the book becomes an exploration of whether this charming but undeniably imperialist character can be "redemeed". For Bradley, the answer is yes: "One thing that I really hope is taken away by readers from the book is the possibility that anyone is capable of changing for the better --also for the worse -- but that you can even take a colonist who is steeped in this idea of white supremacy, which is basically the backbone of British imperialism, who can look critically at his role and reconsider it."



That's all very thought-provoking. But alongside all these philosophical questions surrounding time-travel, we also have the classic questions it raises: Can you change the future? What happens if you change the timeline that led to certain events?

At one point there's an exchange between N and Gore with regard to the climate. He refers to the current heatwave:

-- 'You said it was caused by historic … emissions? Pollution?'
-- 'Yes. Fossil fuels and so forth.'
-- 'Can you go back and stop it from happening?'

Ahh, the 64,000-dollar question...

And it's not long before we learn that we don't just have people who have been brought forward from the past, but also people who have come back from the future... What's their agenda?

Time-travel stories always mess with my head, and this one is no exception. If you change something, you see, surely you'll change everything... (For a discussion of original and modified timelines -- once you've read the book -- see here.)

These attempts to manipulate the characters' timelines constitute the core of the thriller. There's a mole (of course there is...). There's a person working in parallel with his/her former self. There's news from the future about a world gone badly wrong...

***



Many people rave about this book.

I was less enthusiastic. Yes, the premise is intriguing, permitting lots of thought-experiments. And it's definitely an insightful look into the lot of minorities and migrants -- all those, in fact, who are on the wrong end of colonialism.

But for me, there were a few significant negatives:

-- It tries to do way too much... Some of another book-in-the-making found its way into this one ("a far more traditionally literary novel, 'the big novel about the Khmer Rouge, about Cambodia, about the refugee experience, about the British-Cambodian experience,' as Bradley calls it"), and I think that shows. It's overloaded. Just too much going on.

-- I hated the rom-com element, to be honest... It felt weird. Ultimately, I'm squeamish about making historical characters do things they actually didn't do. This issue came up with E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and I couldn't help feel that John Updike's "helpless dead puppets" critique was also relevant here...

-- I found turns of phrase to admire: "Idiot-eyed wood pigeons lumbered across the lawn, belly-deep in clover"; "[Gore] learned to peck at the keyboard with the elegance and speed of a badly burned amphibian"... But I also found the language a little overblown at times: "The air hung like an executed corpse"; "Autumn set in like a decorative inlay"...

-- And the ending came across as a little soft. I would have preferred something a bit more bracing...

***

All in all, then, a mixed bag. But Bradley is definitely an author to watch.