Burn Before Reading

I recently finished reading This is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

  Rating: 4.25/5 stars

"Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Red and Blue, two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions, strike up an unlikely correspondence. But what started as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more: something epic and romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

The discovery of their bond will mean their deaths. There’s still a war going on, and someone has to win that war. That’s how wars work. Right?"

This Is How You Lose the Time War does not make it easy for any reviewer to describe the experience of reading it. As soon as you start to put words in, you hit a wall. How does one explain the action of the novel without surrendering any spoilers? 

I can tell you that the first strand running through this loosely braided narrative comes in the form of a letter. That the first of its kind is only pretend, an instant of self-indulgence, but that it began circling of time for Red, the past cutting into the present like a whetted blade. Then comes the second letter, which is an abyss daring Red to fall inside despite the sense that she and Blue are all digging themselves deeper than ever before. By the third letter, Red feels that they are cutting their own throats by all of this. 

Blue and Red, our protagonists, are two time-traveling spies from rival factions in a time-war-ravaged world, who make contact and find love—and something that frightens them, too—across a void too profound to bridge with anything other than words. The two women are more real to each other than reflections in a mirror. They had borne witness to too many battles waged against time (and each other), but this time too many forces were ready to make siege weapons of their letters. Yet, in the sheer shimmering (im)possibility of every word, they can almost pretend they can get away with it.

This novel is, for lack of a better term, a lot—but in a good way. This Is How You Lose the Time War is a book of sustained beauty and lyricism that also works as a fractured mosaic of a novel—told in swift, brutal strokes, all wound into vertiginous loops of prose. It is not what anyone would describe as a light read by any stretch. Rather, it is the kind of novel that delights in confusing, wrong-footing, and maddening its reader. The kind of novel that demands not only you pay attention, but that you actively participate. If you're here, This Is How You Lose the Time War seems to say, you have to be here: attentive, wide-eyed, and alert.

El-Mohtar and Maxwell, our author duo, in This Is How You Lose the Time War, are in full command of their narrative gifts. Together their language soars as they write of desire, longing, fear, survival, and freedom. The result is prose that reads like an intricate dance, a dialogic push-and-pull as effortless and compelling as the protagonists' correspondence. There’s clearly a lot of trust here between the two authors, and the novel is all the better for it.

That said, those gifts can sometimes double as obstacles. As beautiful as the prose is, This Is How You Lose the Time War is a novel that can feel both exhilarating and exhausting, sometimes simultaneously. There are moments when the lyricism feels labored, the sentences so bedecked with metaphors and analogies that one might crave a little more restraint. Inside the long economy of a novel, I think too much prose (no matter how exquisite) can occasionally hamper the flow of the narrative, and at times, it is the case with This Is How You Lose the Time War.

But one quickly learns that the best way to read This Is How You Lose the Time War is in small merciful doses, lingering more over each sentence, extrapolating meaning from tidbits of language, and slowly stitching the errant pieces into a whole. Ultimately, this becomes the most rewarding experience of reading This Is How You Lose the Time War: this is a novel that not only teaches you how to read it, but how to relax into the chaos of it all and enjoy it too.

Check out This is How You Lose The Time War, and determine who the winner of the war truly is.

Happy Reading :)