Review - This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal al-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is How You Lose the Time War
Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Jo Fletcher Books, 18 July 2019
PB, e 208pp

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance e-copy of This is How You Lose the Time War via NetGalley.

'All good stories travel from the outside in'.

How to describe this book? It's brilliant. It's evocative. It's heartbreaking. It's tender.

Above all, it's beautiful.

In a multiverse not far from here, we find two agents - referred to simply as Red and as Blue. They act for different factions in a Time War: Red works for The Commandant, Blue is an agent of Garden. Both women are human, and more than human. They have formidable combat abilities, endurance, strength and they are able to move backwards, forwards and sideways through space and time, up and down the different braids, the timelines, that denote victory or defeat in the endless war. They are perhaps not born but created, their role to interfere, tip events one way or another - killing a leader, ensuring a technology develops or a trade route opens, something that will cascade down the braids, changing outcomes and winning their side an advantage in some remote age.

What the war is about, who the factions are and why they exist, isn't clear and doesn't need to be. We don't care who wins. What matters is that Red and Blue are eternal opponents, sworn and committed enemies, true believers in their causes - in the service of which they necessarily cross and recross each other, jostling for advantage. And as skilled and intelligent agents, they begin exchanging messages. They are taunting, scoring points. And, perhaps, one is trying to turn the other.

But hard earned, if grudging, respect leads to mutual understanding - perhaps, across all the timeline s in the multiverse, only Red and Blue can truly understand Blue, and only Blue can truly understand Red. Understanding leads to a sort of friendship (with no loss of commitment: "We will still win!") Friendship deepens and leads to... something like love. No, actually, to love.

Channeling the spirit of every story of star-crossed lovers (yes, there are references to Romeo and Juliet) el-Mohtar and Gladstone have spun here a simple, yet deep and ever so beautiful story of doomed love, often poetic ('Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein', 'It feels good to be reciprocal, eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet'), profoundly moving and fundamentally human and true - alongside the weird, eon-spanning SF setting.

And there is more. The authors like nothing more than puncturing their own balloon with a pun or a reference ('no road-met random monster', 'strangling that evil old man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse'). And they won me with the observation that 'Even an immortal can only ride the [London Underground] Circle Line so long' (though it can feel like it sometimes).

It's a short book, one to read in a sitting, growing into the love between the two women, despairing at the fate that has made them what they are, the more so for the conflict being so shrouded and seemingly pointless.

A profound and glorious story, wonderfully written, uplifting even while sad.

VERY strongly recommended.