Compromised: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Also Fallout.
Welcome to Autofictions, where—after a two-year hiatus(!)—I review contemporary fiction and sometimes share more about myself than anyone needs to know. In this edition: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Also, Fallout.
Compromise isnʼt always a bad thing. It can be an act of empathy; itʼs a selfish partner indeed who never compromises with the person they love. At work, we talk about “trade-offs,” the compromises weʼre willing to make (and not make) to put something new into the world. When perfect is the enemy of good, nothing much gets done.
But compromise can also mean giving away a part of oneself, or giving up an ideal. We compromise our morals; we become compromised; we get caught in compromising situations. Making the wrong compromise compromises us.
This idea bubbled at the back of my mind as I read the excellent Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Something about these books—besides the strikingly similar covers—touched the same nerve. But I couldnʼt quite piece it together until I watched the Fallout series, of all things.
For what itʼs worth, I found Fallout to be good, grimy fun, if you like your confections with a side of ghouls and gore (which I do, if the ghoul is Walton Goggins and the gore is that extra). But if thereʼs a more profound message to the casual beheadings and Yves-Klein-blue one-pieces—and Iʼm not sure there is—it might be about the bone-chilling compromises humans are willing to make under the right circumstances. Whether theyʼre locking themselves in vaults and deluding generations of inhabitants or condemning an entire community to nuclear annihilation, the people of the world of Fallout have had to compromise their humanity in a variety of ways to stay alive.
Such compromise is at the heart of Chain-Gang All-Stars, where a Battle Royale-meets-Hunger Games reality show gives incarcerated people a chance to murder their way to freedom. The most talented among the combatants, called Links, earn additional comforts: gourmet meals, plush digs during their multi-day Marches between matches, more dramatic weapons, more prestigious sponsorsʼ names stitched into increasingly hardy armor. They have evocative nicknames and signature styles; they engage in rousing call-and-response chants; they become bona fide celebrities, swarmed by camera-drones broadcasting live, 24/7, to Americansʼ homes. Two of the bookʼs central characters, the lovers Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker (aka Hurricane Staxxx), are the subject of intense and impassioned debate. Who is the better fighter? The more elegant killer? And, ominously: Who would win, if they were pitted against one another?
It goes without saying that every Link who has opted into this perverse entertainment had only the illusion of a choice. Whether they stay in prison or compete to be High Freed (that is, to kill their way to getting out alive; in contrast with Low Freed, which is to get out dead), there is no option that affords them the basic humanity their fans take for granted.
In the eyes of the state, the Links are already compromised. Theyʼve committed the most heinous crimes, so any manner of crime can be committed against them. Adjei-Brenyah manages to body-slam a powerful critique of the violence, racism, and dehumanization of the carceral state together with the pyrotechnics of an action movie and a romance of Shakespearean proportions. His characters are not pat vessels for a moralizing thesis; they donʼt have to be “innocent” to be capable of profound acts of love or “guilty” to perpetrate grotesque acts of cruelty.
The truly compromised in this story are not those who have signed whatʼs left of their lives away to this wicked game; itʼs the good people who stomp in the stands, roaring at each blow. Itʼs the systems theyʼve built that mete out punishments that exceed the crimes, that reward violence with more violence. It is, perhaps, the reader, who canʼt help but breathlessly turn the page to the next high-octane fight scene—and who lives in a world that isnʼt so far removed from the one the author has sketched out.
The Ministry of Timeʼs very-near-future London is no less relatable. (Strip out the time-travel plot, and itʼs just your average Tuesday on the Thames.) When an unnamed bureaucrat joins a secretive government program promising an eye-watering salary, she learns that Britain has recently acquired—through its customary practice of finders-keepers—the technology to travel through time. Itʼs our narratorʼs job to serve as a “bridge” to one of the people theyʼve plucked out of the past, ostensibly to study the mental and physiological effects of time travel.
Itʼs not clear what the bridges are supposed to do with their “expats,” or why these particular people were chosen, other than that they were about to die in their own time so their disappearance wonʼt cause a kerfuffle. All our narrator knows is that sheʼs supposed to take copious notes on her assigned expat, a roguishly handsome explorer who disappeared in the Arctic in 1847, and help him acclimate to modern times while keeping him in the dark about the messier bits of modernity like colonialism, the Holocaust, and September 11th. (Letting him use Netflix is fine.)
What unfolds is both a sci-fi thriller and a romance novel, but also a study in why the bullied sometimes choose to become the bully. The narratorʼs mother survived genocide in Cambodia and painfully and painstakingly rebuilt her life in England; her sister is an outspoken campaigner who adopts (or coopts) this narrative and lambasts her siblingʼs decision to align herself with one of historyʼs great oppressors. But for our narrator, hewing close to the seat of power is a compromise worth making—the state as security blanket.
As the motivations behind the time-travel program come into focus, and predictably turn out to be more sinister than scientific inquiry, we are reminded that safety is a fiction when itʼs outsourced to a bureaucratic machine. Paradoxically, itʼs only when her Victorian lover (who is as white as they come, and as un-PC as you would expect) is aroused to the horrors of the intervening centuries that our Southeast Asian narrator is forced to reckon with her decision to align herself with the perpetrator of past—and future—atrocities.
Both of these books have a surprisingly light touch, for all the heaviness they dole out. Theyʼre funny and sexy and thrilling. In Chain-Gang All-Stars, the humor often takes the form of a sly wink to the reader as fans and media moguls clumsily (but with total conviction) justify their participation in the bloodthirsty spectacle. In The Ministry of Time, the bewildered expats invite us to see contemporary culture afresh, and, well, itʼs pretty silly. (We just… have all the worldʼs music at our fingertips?) Without the candy coating, thereʼs no way the bitter medicine would go down so smooth.
That’s the tricky thing about compromise, the authors remind us. The most palatable ones are often the most sinister. When we fight on behalf of systems instead of the people they ensnare, we compromise what makes us human. Complacency is a choice, and it can be the most compromising one of all.