This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone *
The premise sounds considerably more interesting than I found the actual book. Red and Blue are two agents fighting on opposite sides of a war that stretches across time, with both sides manipulating different timelines in an attempt to create their preferred version of the future. One works for the Garden, an organic, natural society, while the other works for the Agency, a technological collective that reminded me vaguely of something like the Borg. Which one was Red and which one was Blue? I genuinely could not remember for most of the book, and even now I would have to look it up.
The two agents begin as enemies. One of them discovers a letter left by the other on a battlefield, and from there they begin exchanging increasingly elaborate messages while continuing to work against each other across different timelines. The letters are hidden in increasingly strange ways. Sometimes they have to eat something to receive the message. Sometimes the letter is incorporated into some object or living thing. After a while, finding out what bizarre method they were going to use to deliver the next letter became one of the few concrete things I could actually follow.
The problem I had with This Is How You Lose the Time War was not simply that it was complicated. I read science fiction. I read fantasy. I am perfectly happy with time travel and strange worlds and stories that require some thought. The problem was that this book gave me so little to hold onto. Red and Blue travel through different strands of history, but the settings are frequently described so vaguely that I struggled to picture where they were, when they were, or sometimes even whether they were on Earth. I remember Atlantis. I remember London. Beyond that, I have a collection of impressions. A cave. A procession. A battlefield. People doing things somewhere at some point in history. The prose creates images, but those images rarely assembled themselves into an actual place in my head.
That made the time war itself surprisingly difficult for me to care about. There is potentially an interesting idea underneath everything. Red and Blue are constantly manipulating timelines, while the opposing side tries to undo whatever the other has accomplished. One side pushes history in one direction. The other interferes and pushes it somewhere else. Then somebody changes it again. There is something inherently futile about that endless cycle, particularly when both Red and Blue have been turned into tools for enormous systems that seem prepared to keep fighting forever. But I never felt as though I understood enough about either side, their goals, or the consequences of their actions for that idea to have much emotional weight.
Then there are the letters.
Oh my God, the letters.
This is where the book completely lost me because the prose is extremely lyrical, metaphorical and flowery, and I hate flowery writing. I absolutely hate it. The letters become increasingly elaborate as Red and Blue fall in love, and there is also a recurring joke or motif where they address each other using things associated with their respective colours. Instead of simply Red and Blue, we get different red things and blue things. Fruits. Birds. Objects. Images. Metaphors. More metaphors. Probably another metaphor hiding inside the previous metaphor.
I know there are readers who adore this kind of writing. I am very much not one of them.
There is also an enormous amount of implication in the storytelling, and that made the experience exhausting for me rather than intellectually satisfying. I like precision. I like being able to build a clear picture of what is happening from the information the author gives me. That does not mean that I need every single thing spelled out or that I cannot deal with complicated storytelling. But there is a difference between asking me to put pieces together and giving me a cloud of lyrical imagery and expecting me to extract the pieces from it first. With this book, I constantly felt as though I was trying to untangle what the prose was actually telling me before I could even begin thinking about what it meant.
That also affected the central romance. Red and Blue gradually go from taunting one another to becoming fascinated with one another and eventually falling in love, but I never became emotionally invested in that progression. They spend most of the story communicating through letters rather than actually being together, and because I never developed a particularly strong sense of either of them as individuals, their relationship did not work for me either. I understood that they were falling in love because the letters told me they were falling in love. I just never felt it.
Eventually, something genuinely dramatic happens, and my immediate reaction was basically, finally, something is happening. Unfortunately, the story is about time travel, which means the eventual solution involves time travel. Of course it does. By that point I had about an hour left in the audiobook and I increased the speed because I was absolutely determined to finish it. I had already come too far to abandon the book and find something else for the challenge prompt.
Even the title leaves me slightly baffled. This Is How You Lose the Time War suggests that somebody is going to lose the time war, but that is not really what happens. The war seems almost designed to be endless. Both sides manipulate history, undo each other's work and send agents across different strands of time to keep the conflict going. Perhaps that is actually the point. Maybe the only way Red and Blue can truly "lose" the war is by refusing to continue playing their assigned roles in it. That interpretation is considerably more interesting to me than most of what I experienced while actually reading the book.
I can understand, intellectually, why This Is How You Lose the Time War has an audience. If you love lyrical prose, unusual imagery, experimental storytelling, epistolary romance and stories that leave a great deal implied rather than explicitly explained, this may be exactly your kind of book. It is almost the perfect combination of things that do not work for me.
For me, it managed the impressive feat of being incredibly confusing and incredibly boring at the same time. I spent half the book trying to work out what was happening and the other half wishing something would happen. By the end, I was listening faster simply because I wanted to be free.
One star. I survived the time war. That was enough.
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