There's something extremely important about Amal El-Mohtar's and Max Gladstone's 2019 novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, which is that one of the most interesting stories the book tells is one that only becomes apparent very close to the end.
For much of its admittedly brief 198 pages, This Is How You Lose the Time War takes the form of an imaginative but also straight-forward love story developing between two would-be enemies, with the book's chapters consisting primarily of letters produced by two time-traveling spies who write to each other from various eras of history. While skillfully written, these portions of the story sometimes come across as simplistic, with much of the book concerned exclusively with a depiction of the unlikely love that slowly builds between these two characters as they attempt (at first) to erase each other from existence.
All of this establishes El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's novella to be a creatively written but also simple narrative, with the book's plot focusing on its protagonist's love in a way that can at times come across as more trite than subversive. It's only very late in the text that this core love story is both inverted and strengthened, with This Is How You Lose the Time War using its final chapters to turn the focus of its narrative in a direction that transforms the book from a straight-forward love story between two people who think they should be enemies, and instead into an intensely political work about the myopic obsessions underlying militarism.
This Is How You Lose The Time War (Summary and Review)
This Is How You Lose the Time War opens when the lethally efficient time agent known only as "Blue" leaves a letter for a rival time agent known only as "Red" in the ruins of a battle which both characters believe they've won. Red and Blue represent opposing organizations existing on mutually exclusive timelines, with Red serving a "technotopian" government from the far future called simply "the Agency," while Blue serves an inhuman hive-mind from an alternate future that calls itself only "Garden." Due to their mutually exclusive existences, both the Agency and Garden are at war with each other, and send agents up and down the timeline so as to alter history for their own ends.
In her first letter, Blue attempts to frame Red for treason in the eyes of the Agency's shadowy leader, and reveals to Red the extent to which she has sabotaged Red's current mission to change history (all while also claiming to have woven a subliminal message into her letter's text that will render Red a security risk to the Agency). In dryly gleeful tones, Blue writes:
I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards, unable to keep the letters on a page; instead you must absorb them, admit them into your memory. In order to report my words to your superiors you must admit yourself already infiltrated, another casualty of this most unfortunate day. (p.8)
However, like the protagonist of any conventional spy-thriller, Red instantly sees through Blue's plot. Rather than reporting Blue's message to her leaders as Blue expected, Red instead turns her enemy's own ploy against her. Using the very same tactics as Blue, Red places a reply to Blue's letter in a location and context that will demand Blue read her new message, thereby giving herself leverage to call Blue's loyalty to Garden into question in a similar manner to how Blue had attempted to blackmail her with the Agency. While responding to Blue's letter, Red writes:
You think you've wormed inside me--planted seeds or spores in my brain--whatever vegetal metaphor suits your fancy. But here I've repaid your letter with my own. Now we have a correspondence. Which, if your superiors discover it, will start a chain of questions I anticipate you'll find uncomfortable. (p.14)
In this way, a secret conversation develops between Red and Blue, with both characters gradually coming to find in their opponent's words a grudging respect that in turn gives way to kinship. Soon, Red and Blue are seeking companionship in these back and forth exchanges hidden across the eras of history, with each time agent finding in the other an empathy and understanding they have never before experienced with any other being.
El-Mohtar and Gladstone are careful to avoid melodrama in their depictions of Red and Blue's friendship, and so the subtle manner in which both characters realize the depth of their kinship is a high point of the novella's early chapters. In one scene, after Red has finished writing a letter to Blue discussing her own isolated childhood (and in particular an experience she once had attempting to escape the constant surveillance of her era), she writes a lengthy postscript to Blue that concludes with her saying of the Agency she serves:
"PPPS. We're still going to win." (p.65)
To this, Blue responds with her own letter detailing (among other things) a similarly lonely existence as an entity forced to change form at Garden's whim, but who nonetheless strives to retain a continuity of self. Blue then finishes her own postscript with exactly the same words as Red (now spoken in agreement rather than challenge--the "we" suddenly taking on an entirely new meaning).
"PPPS. Of course we're still going to win." (p.73)
Through back and forth chapters like these, El-Mohtar and Gladstone slowly establish parallels between Red and Blue's lives, structuring the novella in such a way that highlights the gradual process by which both characters come to the simple realization that somewhere in their correspondences, they have ceased to serve either the Agency or Garden. Instead, via Red and Blue's shared communications, both characters come to live as two individuals entirely separate from these mindless organizations that they have been taught to serve.
The point at which This Is How You Lose the Time War starts to struggle is that, despite how skillfully written the story of Red and Blue's love is, the archetypal nature of that "forbidden love" narrative is often presented in a manner that comes across as (at least initially) more reductive than subversive. As representatives of both the Agency and Garden, Red and Blue routinely skip across history as they move from one undercover mission to the next, appearing in eras so diverse that they often don't simply seem to inhabit different periods of time, but even entirely different genres of fiction.
In one chapter, a character might find herself drinking tea in a steampunk rendition of Victorian England, while in another a character may appear in a cyberpunk dystopia where hacker-priests worship a malfunctioning supercomputer. There is even a scene in which both Red and Blue alternately visit the city of Atlantis in the final moments before it is destroyed, and in their letters idly commiserate with each other about how much they have always hated the place.
As compelling a concept as these settings often are, the sheer number of worlds that Red and Blue visit from one chapter to the next often requires that This Is How You Lose the Time War place a singular and all-encompassing focus on the story of Red and Blue's love to the exclusion of all else. As both the book's protagonists leap across time to entirely new settings and contexts, there can be no reoccurring characters or locations for the novella to return to. There is not even really space for reoccurring plot points that the story can build upon beyond those central to the main narrative thread. Red and Blue's love is, quite literally, the only constant in the book from one chapter to the next.
In some ways this singular focus contributes to This Is How You Lose the Time War's more compelling story element--a subtilely written tale charting Red and Blue's slow realization that the loneliness they both experience working for the Agency and Garden is rooted in something more profound than simple boredom. The isolation that either character has endured over their lives is ultimately shown to derive from the fact that the time war they are fighting is, literally, a war that exists without a cause. Even the basic nature of this conflict in which time travel is used as a weapon renders the concepts of cause and effect meaningless, and so both characters quietly realize over the course of the novella that their lives in the service of the Agency and Garden are effectively devoid of meaning. There is no purpose that the time war can serve, because a war existing outside of time can't serve a purpose.
The problem is that El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's choice to place Red and Blue's mutual love at the forefront of this broader story about militarism initially risks turning This Is How You Lose the Time War into something trite rather than subversive. Instead of being compelling, the story of how Red and Blue slowly grow to love each other as they travel through time (carrying out the Agency and Garden's needlessly cruel agendas in the process) risks turning the novella into a didactic rather than innovative work of fiction. In spite of their mutual kinship, Red and Blue never quite seem to question the violence they commit at the behest of their respective organizations, which only makes it more difficult to accept the book's quiet implication that it's Red and Blue's mutual love that leads them to understand the senseless nature of the time war they fight. At times, El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's exclusive focus on Red and Blue's letters even leads the reader to wonder if the authors seriously intend to take their themes regarding needless and ever repeating cycles of violence, and reduce it all to the didactic platitude of "all you need is love."
Fortunately this quality does not hold true for the entire book. In its very final chapters This Is How You Lose the Time War turns away from the simplified version of the "forbidden love" storyline that its authors had seemed to be telling, and instead enacts a twist on the story of Red and Blue's relationship that veers that narrative in a new and compelling direction.
Thoughts On The Ending (Spoilers Follow)
Eventually, Red and Blue's letters come to the attention of their superior officers (the Agency's Commandant for Red, and the Hive-mind residing behind Garden's existence for Blue). In turn, the way that these secondary characters view Red and Blue's love (seeing it not even as a security risk as both Red and Blue had feared, but instead merely yet another strategic resource to be exploited) transforms This Is How You Lose the Time War from an archetypal tale of forbidden love, and instead into something far more dynamic. Soon, Red and Blue face a bleak dilemma, with each time agent having been ordered by their superior officer to either seduce or poison the other.
It's here that El-Mohtar and Gladstone begin drawing some very direct parallels between the story of Red and Blue's relationship, and the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet. There is even a scene in which one character (possibly) dies as a result of ingesting poison, prompting her lover to contemplate suicide.
Yet, rather than allowing these parallels to come across as reductive, El-Mohtar and Gladstone instead turn these literary references into active story elements that provide an additional dimension to the book's plot. In one particularly significant moment, Blue travels back in time and attends a performance of Romeo and Juliet itself, and in the process considers the fact that (apparently) in the infinitely branching worlds of the multiverse, Romeo and Juliet can end in so many different ways that she never knows which outcome to expect. Specifically, the text reads:
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.She is not delighted now. She watches the performance with all the tense fervor of awaiting prophecy.She leaves before the end. (p.158-159)
This choice to reference a well-known story (Romeo and Juliet) and then obscure that story's ending allows El-Mohtar and Gladstone to take what would otherwise have been a simple tale about two lovers who are (presumably) destined to end a war with their tragic deaths, and instead turns This Is How You Lose the Time War into a book that cleverly begins rewriting its core storyline, even as that story is in the process of nearing its completion.
As the parallels between Romeo and Juliet build, it ironically becomes increasingly difficult to predict which way El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's iteration of this story's themes will go. In this version, the "feud" that Red and Blue's love bridges (the time war) is not a conflict that can be resolved with a tragedy. Shakespeare's play ended when the Montague and Capulet families made peace, united in their shared grief at Romeo and Juliet's deaths. In the case of the leaders of the Agency and Garden however, even grief seems an experience of which these entities would be incapable. As Red herself eventually remarks to a soldier whom she meets very close to the novella's final line:
"Garden doesn't deserve us. Neither does the Agency." (p.194)
Conclusion
By its ending, This Is How You Lose the Time War manages to engage with its core narrative in a way that revitalizes content which had initially seemed hollow. Ultimately, the book becomes an intensely subversive story--a time travel narrative which, true to form, concludes by doubling back on its own source material to rewrite its beginning just before the end. Because of this, the novella is able to take what at first seems a simplistically tragic "forbidden love" storyline, and then begin interrogating that story in unexpected ways--twisting and elaborating on its content as the book seeks to find a fate for its two protagonists that is better than the one they supposedly await.
It turns out that the story of Romeo and Juliet is still compelling, even (and perhaps especially) if you give both characters time machines.