This is a transcript of my latest podcast episode – you can listen to the episode here.
Hello and welcome to Resurrected Reviews Revisited, part of the Will You Still Love It Tomorrow podcast. I’m Annie and, in each Reviews episode, I pick something I’ve reviewed sometime since 2005, reread or rewatch it, and then compare my reactions. Fair warning: there will be spoilers.
This month, my pick is This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
It’s a sci-fi love story, first published in 2019, and the GoodReads summary is as follows:
“Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It says: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.”
Before revisiting it, my recollections of my original experience of encountering this book are as follows:
I know, immediately after reading this for the first time, I passed it on to Dave to read, and I know he was reading it on our apocalyptic trip to Center Parcs in the third week of March 2020… So I extrapolate from that I must have read it in early 2020. I also know it’s one of my few five-star rated books on GoodReads, so I’m fairly sure I enjoyed it! Though I only remember the most nebulous details of what it’s about, because my memory for books is terrible.
Here’s what I thought on revisiting it this year.
It’s a short book, which initially makes it seem like a quick read. But, oh no…
The text is almost poetry and quite difficult to make sense of in places. Nothing is clear or straightforward or simple. There are obscure images and fragmented sentences and a complex world of agencies battling for supremacy both backwards and forwards in time. And a love story between two agents on opposing sides, each leaving hidden messages where they know the other will find them.
For me, it’s easiest and most enjoyable just to read it without worrying about the meaning, to let it slide over me and take shape gradually. I probably miss some details and I certainly don’t catch every bit of meaning, but it comes together into a mostly coherent story overall. And I don’t have to keep stopping to puzzle out every sentence.
The two agents are only referred to as Red and Blue, and the book alternates between their first-person viewpoints and a letter in each chapter.
The first letter is very imaginative – a mostly blank piece of paper that simply says: “Burn before reading.” When Red sets it alight, words appear on the page just before it burns away, seemingly protecting the message from being read more than once.
I love how suspicious Red is, assuming it’s some kind of trap, but unable to resist reading it anyway. The narrative says she likes feeling things and that makes her different from her fellow agents.
This is a great quote:
“Killing gets easier with practice, in mechanics and technique. Having killed never does, for Red.”
We get a lot of character detail in just a few pages, even in amongst the baffling time travel mechanics and complexity of a war that travels backwards as well as forwards.
I’ve read a lot of writing advice in my time – and one common rule is that you should ensure every word serves a specific purpose. I’m much more instinctive in my writing and I don’t want to spend the effort to look at my word choices in that amount of detail. But this book is a masterclass in making every word count.
And it’s all gorgeous – despite the blood and guts and destruction. Or perhaps partially because of them. And the imaginative nature of how each of the letters is constructed is amazing.
I love the central premise of two enemies gaining a sense of satisfaction from finding a foe they deem worthy, and being drawn into an ever more complex relationship by the need to connect to someone they see as an equal in a conflict they’ve both become inured to.
And the sense of threat from someone in one or other agency being aware of their communication comes into it much earlier than I remembered – on page 6, in fact.
And I love that all three of them are women. As is the Agency Commandant.
I also love the contrasts drawn between the two sides – one crystal, the other plant-based – hard versus soft, sterile versus organic. As Blue says in one of her letters – “My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia.”
The chapters and letters make references to so many specific incidents, worlds, events and battles in just a few lines, enough to give a sense of what may have happened, but very brief all the same. So many of them could probably be expanded into whole novels of their own – yet here, they provide the backdrop to a much more intimate and personal tale.
Both agents make amusing references to things that would be ancient by their respective presents – like poems by Shelley or 1980s pop songs – which is interesting. But then they have both experienced many different time periods, so I guess it makes sense.
I love the terminology – they talk about travelling upthread (backwards) or downthread (forwards) and refer to different timelines as numbered strands in time’s braid. It’s really lovely and very imaginative.
In the first few chapters, I feel like Red comes across more strongly and with more depth than Blue. There’s a fantastic bit that talks about the deprivations and physical suffering she’s endured during one decade-long stint of deep cover in the past. The narrative asks if she misses all the advancements and luxuries of the future, that would have mitigated all the unpleasant things she’s experienced of these years. And then is just says – “not really.”
But overall, I’m not really feeling it in the same way I assume I did the first time around. It gets very repetitive very quickly. Each short chapter has one of the agents on a mission (all of which are fascinating and tantalising in their depth and engagement, even in a few pages), finding a letter from the other, which they think they destroy, but which is subsequently picked up and reconstructed by the seeker. And then we get the letter, which is always fun and interesting. But by 50 pages in, I have to admit I was looking for something more – something to actually happen. Which suggests to me that I’m not approaching the book with the right mindset this time…
And then there’s a couple of lines like this and I’m drawn right back in again:
“No crystals here, no flying cars, no perfect governments, no psychic powers. (Those last two things don’t exist, anyway.)”
The sense of threat is ever-present, with the seeker always only one step behind, and rogue agents being caught and killed, or stranded in unpleasant times. And yet both Red and Blue continue their correspondence regardless.
Red asks Blue if she has any friends and her reply includes this:
“It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly, and certainly I’ve received no complaints. But that is work.”
Which is desperately sad and says a lot about how they’re both forced to live their lives – in amongst people who are not their own, living lives that are designed to achieve specific ends, outside their own time and constantly hiding their true nature from those around them. It adds an authenticity to their desire to find connection in each other, since they must always feel so alone.
And then we get this:
“Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red’s letters.”
And that totally got me – so, just over a third of the way through, the emotion started to come through at last and I was caught.
And almost immediately afterwards, Blue risks her life and her mission (and her continued place in Garden) to save Red from a Garden monster created specifically to kill Agency personnel. And Red leaves her a letter on actual paper that won’t disappear after reading, so they both expose themselves tremendously for the other. And yet, ironically, because Blue takes the letter with her, it’s the first time the seeker can’t gather up the traces to read it after she’s gone.
When Red thinks Blue has betrayed her, it’s absolutely heartbreaking and when the seeker reads the next letter, even she weeps, which says a lot. And, in the next chapter, it says ‘a seeker’, rather than ‘the seeker’, which suggests the original one may have been replaced for starting to sympathise with her targets of surveillance…
A few chapters later, though, Seeker gets a capital letter and loses her article, but I’m not sure what the progression denotes, even after the reveal of Seeker’s identity at the end.
It’s two thirds of the way through the book when Red declares her love directly – and it feels somehow too blunt, too stark, too bold, after all the poetic metaphor and lyrical obscurity that precedes it. So, strangely, it diminished the power of their relationship for me in some ways.
Blue comes up with a master plan to turn the tide of the time war, presents it to Garden and then implements it, putting the Agency very much on the back foot. So, she’s definitely still loyal and working towards Garden’s ultimate aims, unless they will directly affect Red’s safety.
And then Commandant puts Red directly on Blue’s trail, saying she thinks Blue has been grooming Red for a long time, to try and turn her to Garden’s side. This doesn’t plant any doubt in Red’s mind about Blue’s sincerity, though, which shows how deep the connection goes. But she is unable to maintain her true loyalty to the Agency, since she’s been tasked with attacking Blue directly.
Garden, on the other hand, is fearful for Blue’s safety and wants to take her off the board entirely, so Blue has to argue the benefits of keeping her in play, so she can continue to correspond with Red.
The fragmentary nature and profanity of Red’s next letter, where she says they’ll have to stop writing to each other is very heartfelt and a good contrast to the more flowery voice of her previous ones.
If I wrote down every great quote, I’d be reproducing most of the book, but these few lines stood out to me:
“She peers behind the faceplates while the experts work, and whenever she can see them, they are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily.”
And then, when Blue receives the ‘fake’ letter from Red, the one intended as their first contact by Commandant, that’s laced with carefully developed poison to contaminate Garden, there’s a line that’s so simple in its effectiveness that it took my breath away:
“The letter is beautifully composed. She is not.”
And of course she takes the poison and reads the letter within the letter within the poison – because she fears not doing so will put Red in danger. And the letter in and of itself shows that Red knows she will too – and Red’s sense that she is unworthy of Blue’s devotion because she’s not sure she would do the same, is devastating. Not least because she’s already failed to do the same, by composing the ‘fake’ letter and delivering the poison, rather than refusing to do so and revealing her betrayal of the Agency.
But, even so, Blue knows Red will come to her and so she also knows it’s safe to leave a last letter for Red to find, even though both sides are now pursuing her, hellbent on destroying her.
The Seeker turns out to be from neither side, but we don’t get to find out more, because Red is too broken to care about unravelling the mystery, which is pretty annoying, even despite the impact of this incredibly emotional moment.
It’s not clear in Blue’s final letter if she truly thinks the whole thing has been a long con and that Red really intended to betray her all along. I choose to believe it’s a ruse to fool the Agency into thinking Red is still loyal, in case they intercept the letter somehow – and I’m proved right.
Red somehow manages to escape retribution at the hands of either side and goes back to her job, though it’s empty of all meaning now, and I’m wondering what’s still to come in the last 20 pages, since I can’t remember what happens at the end…
Red still stands out more clearly as a whole character than Blue, even at the end – and then she gets several chapters all to herself at the ultimate conclusion, so she’s definitely the stronger protagonist.
And then it turns out the Seeker has been Red all along, gathering up the last traces of all the letters to infuse Blue into herself so she can transform enough that Garden’s defences will let her through when she travels there. She makes her way through countless hostile worlds to infect Blue in the past with the antidote to the poison she will craft to kill her in the future – which is delightfully cyclical and brings everything very neatly back to where it started.
And Red does sacrifice herself to save Blue, after all, proving herself worthy even as she commits herself to capture and torture at the hands of those who trained her.
I love that neither side is presented as better or worse than the other – and that Red and Blue reject them both in the end. And their plan to take on all-comers and carve out their own future together is glorious.
In terms of diversity:
Red, Blue, the seeker and the Agency Commandant are all female. Even the entity of Garden is referred to as female. So, all the characters beside unnamed bit players are female.
It mentions Blue having dark skin at one point, but I think they change their appearance to fit in with wherever and whenever they are.
And, of course, the central love story is queer.
Final thoughts:
I wasn’t apprehensive going into this reread because I was confident I’d love the book as much as I did the first time. And then it didn’t immediately grab me and I started to get scared. But, by a third of the way through, I was entirely sold again and read the rest of the book almost in one sitting. It’s truly a masterpiece and one of the few books about time travel that I find completely satisfying. But I think, given how long it took me to really get into it, I’d give it 4.5 stars this time around, rather than five.
Looking back to my original review, it turns out it was indeed in March 2020, so I was right about that, at least.
Here’s what I thought the first time around:
“People have been recommending this to me for months and I was worried I was going to be disappointed – but it’s amazing! It’s about two agents from opposing factions, travelling through time to influence the timeline in particular directions. But it’s not the kind of book you would assume from that plot synopsis. It’s actually an incredibly elegant, eloquent, existential, lyrical, beautiful love story between two people who can only correspond via letters delivered in the weirdest possible ways. The whole thing is gorgeous – bits of it are very funny, there are so many references to things I was never going to get, but I still loved it. And the multiple twists towards the end are revealed in the best possible way – so that you don’t see them coming but they’re instantly obvious and very satisfying. Wonderful, wonderful book.”
So yes – still great – still gorgeous – still affecting – still satisfying.
And that’s it for this episode of Reviews Revisited.
Next month, I’m going to be revisiting The Hunger Games, which carries with it a certain amount of apprehension, since I was a massive fan of the whole series for quite a while, but I’m looking forward to seeing whether or not it still holds up.
Many thanks to Cambo for our theme music. And thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you have any comments, or if you want to tell me about a time you revisited some media, and whether or not you still loved it afterwards, you can email me at willyoustillloveit@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Lastly, please join us for the next main episode of Will You Still Love It Tomorrow in two weeks to hear what happens when I get Dave to watch Cool Runnings, which I was very surprised to discover he’s never seen. Will Dave like it at all? And will I still love it after our discussion? I’m looking forward to finding out!
Bye for now!