Rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Date read: April 11 to 15, 2020
Location: in between board meetings over Skype, which I prefer more than the old way, which was in person… let’s never go back to the old way…
I am too cold-blooded to appreciate this novella in its entirety, but I am not too dense to see that it wasn’t written for the likes of me or even with me in mind.
This book will appeal to a number of people, as it should because it’s written with love. You could feel it in every sentence. However, the readers who aren’t within its reach will most likely want to set it on fire.
And that’s fine. To each their own. I only wanted to say that, even though it didn’t work for me, I’m sure a lot of readers will love it and appreciate its craft and depth.
More thoughts and spoilers to be added later.
* * * * *
It’s been a couple of days since I finished reading, and I think I got it now.
For me, it boils down to the story not making much sense, and the ending, which should have tied everything together, doesn’t make sense either. So the experience of reading was like wading through a tunnel filled to the top with poetic word salad, only to find absolutely nothing at the end. No closure, no pay off, no sense of what this book is about. I swear I read it from cover to cover, and yet I have almost no grasp on the story itself.
So this isn’t so much a review as it is a whiteboard in which I list what I think happened in this book.
In the far distant future, there are two factions at war. Each side has time-traveling agents tasked with going back and forth in time to alter certain events, called strands, that would presumably ripple through time and affect whatever timeline the two opposing factions currently occupy. If this sounds complicated, it’s because it is and quite possibly too complicated for this pair of authors.
The purpose of altering these stands is all a gamble though, from what I can parse out. Each side thinks that changing, or rather course-correcting, the past and the future will lead their side to winning the time war.
It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means. But enough philosophy.
The importance of this quote is to showcase the first time this book made me cringe.
As interesting as it sounds, the time war doesn’t play out in the book, which is what I’m most frustrated about. That this over-the-top concept doesn’t get adequate page-time, because it’s only an elaborate backdrop for a much lesser story–pseudo love story?–between two opposing agents, called Red and Blue, is a waste. Not only of what could have been quite good, but of my time as well.
The book opens on a battlefield sometime in the distant future where bodies are strewn about everywhere. Red walks among the corpses, and we’re told that her side has won this battle. Then she sees a vaguely familiar face across the field and stumbles across a letter from Blue, written in a mocking tone about setting a trap.
The next chapter opens with Blue, somewhere in time, on a mission. In the middle of doing whatever she has been tasked to do, she finds a letter from Red, also written in a mocking tone. It teases about a trap.
We make so much of lettercraft literal, don’t we? Whacked seals aside. Letters as time travel, time-travelling letters. Hidden meanings.
I wonder what you see me saying here.
I, too, wonder the same thing.
They alternate from chapter to chapter, and at the end of every chapter they find a mocking letter from the other agent. The letters contain a mix of references to a number of things, most of them literary and obscure. They also contain what seem to me like inside jokes between the authors and their writer friends. Red and Blue also call each other cutesy names on the variations of the colors “red” and “blue.” That gave me indigestion.
Although the chapters and letters are short, wading through them and working out the syntax seemed to take hours for me. I didn’t get or cared about most of the inside jokes and couldn’t see the point of this back-and-forth exchange between Red and Blue.
I veer rhapsodic; my prose purples.
You definitely do. The other one, as well. On that, we are in agreement.
Over the course of these letters and at around the half-way point of the book, Red and Blue “fall in love” and their regards for each other intensify with each correspondence. This came out of nowhere to me. I had to back up a few chapters to see what I’d miss, which was nothing. It literally came out of nowhere. I think Red was the first one to say it, and then Blue agreed. They are in love with each other from that moment on. At no point during the story do Red and Blue meet face to face, and their letters are a confounding tangle to work through. So this falling in love business is a head-scratcher to me.
Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying. I wanted to say, I want to make you tea to drink, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of doing so; I wanted to say, your letter lives inside me in the most literal way possible, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of structures and events. I wanted to say, words hurt, but metaphors go between, like bridges, and words are like stone to build bridges, hewn from the earth in agony but making a new thing, a shared thing, a thing that is more than one Shift.
[…]
Do you laugh, sea foam? Do you smile, ice, and observe your triumph with an angel’s remove? Sapphire-flamed phoenix, risen, do you command me once again to look upon your works and despair?
[…]
PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.
This last one literally gave me indigestion.
It just occurs to me that the language of the letters has underlying tones of sadism and masochism. There are many mentions of the violence Red and Blue wish to inflict on each other before they “fell in love.” Then after they fell in love, they continue to wax poetics about violence through imagery, but this time it’s of the violence of their affection for each other. Violence wrapped up in over-the-top romanticism–not a new invention, but it adds another layer to the progression of their relationship. I guess?
Warning: all spoilers from this point on.
Both of their agencies eventually catch onto their dalliance. Red is forced by hers to lure Blue into a trap, but she warns Blue via a letter hidden in a letter of her agency’s intentions. Blue, however, doesn’t want Red to be punished for failing the mission, so she goes along with the trap and sacrifices herself instead. Red is too late to save Blue. She grieves, breaks off from her agency, and goes on the run.
It gets even more convoluted from here. Red decides to go back in time in an attempt to save Blue. She finds Blue when Blue was a child and breaks into Blue’s agency to “infect” Blue with her “essence.” The idea is to “mark” Blue when she was young, so that when she grows up, she can find Red again.
(In this scene, we see an adult kiss a child, and alarm bells went off in my head. This book went from simply being “not for me” to “wtf did I just read” and why. It didn’t have to be this way. This was clearly the authors’ choice, to have this squicky scene top off their non-story. So now I’m seriously reconsidering reading anything else by these authors.)
Everything Red plans goes according to plan, and they reunite in the future where Red is captured and held prisoner by her agency. Blue breaks her out. They go on the run through time together. The end.
You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, time.
I must ask again. What is the point of all of this?
Nobody wins the time war, and I definitely lost time finishing this book.
This story could have and should have been around 30 pages, and it would have been just fine.
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