"This is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (novella, 2019)

 **A wonderful novella, whose existence is merely a justification to tell a love story and explore the highest heights of florid prose**

I've been sitting on this one for a while.  First of all, I try when I can to write about books that my friends might not have read, and this book was certainly the darling of the scene for a while.  I feel like many of my friends who would like this book have already read it, hah!

The other reason though is that I will readily admit this isn't for everyone.  Because let's be clear on what this book isn't, it isn't a thriller-paced "time war" story with dramatic action-packed time travel shenanigans as each side tries to outdo the other skipping across timelines to edit the past and defeat their rival.  And if that's what you expect going in, you're going to have a very confused time reading it

To make matters even more confusing, there is a time war going on, with dramatic action-packed time travel shenanigans as each side tries to outdo the other skipping across timelines to edit the past and defeat their rival.  One, working for the Agency and taking orders from the enigmatic Commandant, versus the other, a soldier for the Garden.  A technofascist power versus a mysterious organic groupmind, both vying to make small changes in the timeline to create a world in which their side is victorious--in which there side has always been victorious.  Order vs. Chaos, hierarchical vs. communal, mechanical vs. organic, Red vs. Blue.  No really, those are the names of the main characters, Red and Blue, locked in a war across time

Except . . . we the reader don't actually see any of that.  It's all basically happening off-screen.  It's  backdrop for the real story, which is that Red and Blue have started leaving each other letters scattered across history.  Teasing, taunting, just having fun with each other:  "PS. The keyboard's coated with slow acting poison. You'll be dead in an hour. / PPS. Just kidding! Or . . . am I? / PPPS. I'm just screwing with you. But postscripts are fun!"

This is a wonderful book, but I'll be the first to admit that it's not for everybody.  It's simultaneously both very short and completely full of fluffy prose, I could literally explain the entire plot of the novel in a short paragraph.  But that's not what this book is about

I loved this book it knew what it wanted to be, it set its goals, and it accomplished them with flying colors.  It wanted to tell a love story, wanted to do so in an aching and emotional manner, and wanted to do so with prose that is at times truly heart-breakingly beautiful.  It succeeds

The story is told out mostly through the texts of the letters these two opponents send to each other, and for large parts of the book the actual "action" chapters are really just brief interludes between letters, as the authors describe with obvious enjoyment the increasingly outlandish ways these agents send each other letters through time (at one point, apparently one agent has skipped through time controlling the growth pattern of a tree so that the rings will form a coded message--that's not even close to the weirdest method)

In fact, unlike many collaborative works where the authors tend not to reveal "who did what", we actually do know how this one was written.  Red's letters were written by Gladstone, Blue's by El-Mohtar.  The authors have said that they actually really got to feel a little bit of the suspense and joy that their characters felt, every time they received the next letter from their partner:

"Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside."

(as for the interlude chapters, I kinda get the sense that those were written largely separately as well, each other trying to outdo the other in the craziest way a time agent could hide a letter for another.  Which is great)

This book might not work for everyone because there is so much text that, to be blunt, doesn't matter to the plot at all.  The settings in which we find our main characters are described in gorgeous detail, from the hordes of Genghis Khan reference in the quote above to a far-future technocult to the murder of Julius Caesar to Atlantis (which apparently always gets destroyed, one way or another) . . . and then never visited again.  I'd accuse the authors of showing off, but it doesn't really feel that way--rather, it feels more that they are simply indulging themselves, taking an almost-Borgesian (not an adjective I use lightly!) joy in writing beautiful prose simply because they can.  Even they were showing off a little, they were both merely showing off for their friend.  Just as Red and Blue do in the novel, really.  I like that.  I like that a lot

And yes, they harness this joy of writing simply for writing's sake in order to tell what is at its heart one of the oldest stories:  Two people who, on the surface, could not be more different, managing to find each other nonetheless

If Blue were a scholar—and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be—she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.

One of the oldest stories, told very, very well (if florid prose is what you're into, at least)

I loved this book

"I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us. Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don’t blend: the redder the sky the bluer the water, as we tilt away from the sun."