One of the best reasons to read any book is to learn about another world. If that book is also set in the past you can do so without ever leaving the planet. And if the story involves characters that travel from the past to our present day, it opens up all sorts of avenues to discuss differing perspectives on race and culture. An engaging example of time travel as a vehicle for enlightenment is found in Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, The Ministry of Time.

This dual protagonist story features a polar explorer from the Victorian era and his modern-day unnamed “bridge,” a British-Cambodian civil servant. Bradley herself is British-Cambodian (though an editor at Penguin, not a government employee). When interviewed about the inspiration for her romantic thriller, she said she wrote it “kind of by accident.”

During lockdown Bradley took refuge in The Terror, a TV series about a doomed 1845 Arctic exploration, and became fixated on a historical figure, Lt. Graham Gore, described as “a man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.” She determined he would probably be better able than her to cope with the challenges of a modern-day pandemic.

Fantasizing about what it would be like to have him move in to her apartment—and writing about it for an online group of polar explorer enthusiasts—turned into Ministry.

Not long into the novel Lt. Gore discovers from his bridge that not only have humans explored the Poles, they’ve also been to the moon. His response: “My England was not like this.”

And therein likes the delicious opportunity to see how the world changes—not only in geographical exploration but in how humans perceive things differently. Some topics are serious—imperialism, immigration, inherited trauma. While others are more comical—dating expectations, television, the internet.

Through their relationship both characters are forced to challenge their preconceived notions of how the world should work. Because Lt. Gore is transplanted from the past, remarks he makes that would be considered racist today, don’t cause the reader to bristle in the same way. Instead, we see more clearly how someone’s time and place impacts their perceptions.

For example, initially he refers to his bridge as “half-caste.” She hesitates about correcting him initially because of her own concerns about the appropriate way to describe herself. “I used to think every mixed-race person was an island, composed of a population of one…maybe it’s because I wanted, willfully, to be an exception.”

Part of her job, though, is to help Lt. Gore assimilate. She is expected to be a “day-by-day dictionary” that will teach him modern behaviors and language. “I had to correct ‘ancestor’ for  ‘grandparent,’ ‘sacred’ for ‘polite,’ ‘tribal leaders’ for  ‘farmers.’”

(I couldn’t help but laugh at the overly serious PC-ness of it all, even as I recalled doing the same thing when my parents would say things that seemed inappropriate but were actually just words or phrases from their era.)

At the same time we see her gain an appreciation for the refined manners and chivalrous actions required in an earlier era. She also comes to a new awareness of her own blind spots.

“I didn’t understand that my value system—my great inheritance–was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress.”

Reading—and writing—historical fiction helps us come to the same conclusion. Whatever “system” we are in is bound to change. Progress is recognizing those different systems and learning how to depart from them.

As James McBride writes in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, “Light is only possible through dialogue between cultures, not through rejection of one or the other.”