Review: This is How You Lose the Time War (2019)
This is How You Lose the Time War gets praised for its use of language. “Poetic” and “lyrical” are thrown around a lot. But this is a book that unironically uses the phrase “puckered tracery of trauma” to describe a character’s scar. I can love a book that revels and luxuriates in its own language. This is not that.
It’s also absolutely riddled with trite quips. Here’s a sampling from the first ten pages:
“the letter is a gauntlet thrown”
“Your unstoppable force to our immovable object”
“A glass jar of water boils in an MRI machine. In defiance of proverbs, Blue watches it.”
“the data gets harder to extract from the depth’s of her fist’s clench”
There are only so many ways to frame a sentence, and I can forgive a few cliches in a long book. This isn’t a long book, though! It seemingly wants to be treated as Serious Fiction that transcends the common perception of genre fiction — and especially sci-fi — as pulpy trash, and that desire is hard to take seriously when the text is cluttered with so many limp, uninspired phrases.
Finally, the voices of the two main characters — Red and Blue — are indistinguishable, despite the fact that each is from a radically different future timeline. Yes, one of the book’s themes has to do with the way loving someone means taking a part of them into yourself, which could perhaps justify lovers’ voices joining into a kind of harmony. But Red and Blue are this way from the very beginning. There is no chance for their voices to grow and twine together as the narrative unfolds.
I realize that I’m vastly out-of-step with the popular consensus on this book. Well so be it. I wanted to like it, but I can’t forgive the language!
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