Bradley on her hero: ‘He’d be so angry with me’

And that turned into the first draft of The Ministry, which she wrote in 11 weeks: “It started out as a silly game and it’s ended as much more.”

She picked the four other expats as representative of significant moments in history: Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth was plucked from World War I; Margaret Kemble from the plague in 1665; Thomas Cardingham, a lieutenant in the English Civil War in 1645, and Anne Spencer from Robespierre’s Paris in 1793. At one point, Gore and Kemble watch the film, 1917: “Poor Arthur,” says Gore. “I had no idea.”

Bradley has a lot of fun with Gore in 21st century London and takes plenty of liberties with his character. “There is one mention in a letter of him smoking over the side of a boat, so I made him a chain smoker – that kind of thing.”

So Gore learns to ride a bicycle, struggles to type, is entranced by music streaming, hates The Beatles but loves Tamla Motown music. He likes Great Expectations, finds Master and Commander “upsettingly nostalgic”, Hemingway “shocking”, and immerses himself in Geoffrey Household’s classic thriller, Rogue Male. As a Victorian, he is uncomfortable sharing a house with an unmarried woman and is perplexed when some young women call him a DILF.

“I sometimes think, wouldn’t it be awful if he really came back and read this book? He’d be so angry with me,” Bradley says. “I would like to imagine that, given that he was a very friendly and warm and curious person, he would have been as open to the 21st century as the character in the book. Realistically, I think he would have hated it.”

But Bradley is doing much more than having fun. As a person of mixed race – Cambodian and British – and making her narrator the same, she writes plenty about “the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, [that] roll like floods across human history”. After all, the expats face the same problems – “psychologically and emotionally, they would be experiencing the kind of dissociation, loneliness, strangeness of a refugee”. As she has a heritage of exodus, she knew she could write it well.

She borrowed the character of the unnamed narrator from a novel she had been writing about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. Bradley says all the racist comments directed at the bridge have been said to her. Hard to believe that on a first date, someone made a crack to her about “Pol Pot noodles”.

Her Cambodian mother is working her way through the book, but because English is not her first language, it’s taking time. “She does refer to the mother in the book as ‘me’, and the bridge as if she’s her daughter. I have had to say, ‘Mum, have you noticed these aren’t our lives?’.”

Bradley’s Cambodian novel remains in her bottom drawer. She felt some sort of obligation to write about Cambodia – she has visited there – the Cambodian diaspora, the Khmer Rouge and her family, but “obligation,” she says, “is the death of creativity”.

”Every time I read it, I think what I am going to say with this? What am I offering a readership by just recounting, again, the atrocities. In non-fiction that is useful as a kind of investigative thing, but in fiction I don’t know if I’m adding anything to the world by saying that.”

But she has finished a second novel that should be published next year.

“It’s partly about a woman in a lighthouse who is between the land of living and the land of the dead, and she has a series of apprentices … Occasionally, I describe it as being a book about closure and partly a book about the fact that we all have death in common, but we can choose to have love in common.”

What she is sure about is that she’ll never have as much fun writing as with The Ministry: “It was such a joy, it was so freeing. I’m often asked what genre were you writing, and the answer is: I wasn’t because I wasn’t writing for a market.” As she puts it, you only get to be a debut novelist once.

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But that doesn’t mean she can’t revisit that first novel, which is being adapted for the small screen. Indeed, she has a sequel in mind.

“I have an idea of what happens. And I do think there would have to be quite a lot of change. The romantic hero of The Ministry has gone through so much and is very upset, so I think would be a slightly different character – they would both be different characters. They changed so much over the book. I don’t know whether people would find that terribly distressing to encounter a very changed Graham.”

Meanwhile, Bradley will have to make do with the striking picture of Graham Gore on the wall behind her desk.

The Ministry of Time is published by Sceptre. Kaliane Bradley is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival and Sydney Writers’ Festival.