I figured out nonrepresentational art in the spring of 2009 at the Tate Modern. I was there with my mother and a close friend, and the friend asked my mother–
(Bear with me; I will get to Time War in a minute.)
–what a particular piece of art meant. My mother said, “You don’t have to worry about that. You just have to look at what the artist made, and see if it resonates anything in you. And if not, maybe you weren’t the audience for it.” This advice was not directed at me, a person too proud to admit it if I didn’t know what Jackson Pollock was on about (which I didn’t then and still don’t), but it has proved to be valuable advice all the same. There’s a particularity to artistic stylization — in modern art, in poetry, in your swooshier prose writing — that requires a resonance between creator and consumer, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re nowhere.
If you’re thinking I have used up a lot of words in a row as a preface to admitting that I didn’t love This Is How You Lose the Time War, you are perfectly correct. But I didn’t love it in a way I find interesting and want to think more about. All signs pointed to me and this book being a perfect match. It’s a semi-epistolary time travel romance about a woman called Red from a sciencey time army and a woman called Blue from a magicky time army, and they do time battles and thwart each other’s plans and fall in love. On paper this should have been great for me. I love it when a murderbird character finds herself in disconcerting possession of an emotion, and this book had two murderbirds.
On the other hand, this book isn’t so much a time travel story or a romance story (although it is both of those things) as it is a vehicle for swooshy prose. Here is what the prose is like:
She stops when she finds the letter.
Kneels.
The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?
The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.
She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.
I am on record as being generally more interested in story-forward books than prose-forward ones, and you may accept that as a statement of my own starting point. But regardless of your feelings about books that have “prose delivery vehicle” as a prominent goal (they are frequently not my cup of tea, Marilynne Robinson), they play a high-risk game in the same way that nonrepresentational art or poetry do. I can appreciate the hard work that went into Jackson Pollock’s paintings all day, but they will never stop me in my tracks the way Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons did at the Tate Modern. I was rocked back on my heels by those paintings. Poetry functions the same way: Whether you understand the sense of it on a vocab-and-syntax level is often irrelevant to how emotionally impactful you find it.
We spoke on podcast recently about how utterly subjective hope is, in books — how the same book can make one person feel exhausted and miserable, and another person rejuvenated and hopeful. I believe that any piece of art that has as a main goal the evocation of emotion and mood narrows its audience, purely because it is functioning on a different level of engagement that slightly bypasses the “interpret the words and their meanings” level and gets into something far harder to articulate.
When a book or a poem or a piece of art works like this for you, it really really works. It feels like something beyond the intellectual experience of reading, or even the typical emotional experience of reading. It’s more visceral, like the book has gone fishing for exactly you and lodged its hooks in your soft tender heart and now you are just being dragged along, willy-nilly, wherever it wants to take you. It’s intense. Maybe you think about it for years and years afterward, like I do about this passage from White Is for Witching:
In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?
The very-very-personal-ness of this kind of writing and how it hits you and how it’s meant to hit you does truly mean that it’s Not for Everyone in a way that can be quite hard to predict. You can appreciate the above passage on a sentence level and a meaning level, you can get it without that passage slamming into you like a freight train, the way it does to me. As I’ve said, This Is How You Lose the Time War described in bullet points is such a me book that it’s almost comical; but you can’t bullet point how noticeable prose will make you feel. I’m not even convinced you can bullet point how it’s meant to make you feel. Leah Bobet1 said something so sensible about this recently:
Relatedly, I’ve realized after years what it is I *like* about poetry.
There’s a lot of good in a form where our interior lives exist without pressure for explanation or translation.
— I came in like a breaking ball (@leahbobet) July 15, 2019
How can cover copy tell you whether a prose-forward story will speak to your interior life, or a collection of poetry? It’s impossible, even impossibler than marketing materials typically are in predicting what you’re going to like. Self-serving as it may seem to say this in a post about a book I didn’t like that litrally everybody else in the world seems to adore, it also isn’t a case of anybody having messed up. The authors didn’t make a misstep. I didn’t not get it. It’s just that the match between them and me didn’t occur. Their elegant, complicated, weird swooshy writing didn’t resonate anything in me.
Sometimes that’s just how the fuck it goes.
Note: I received an ARC of this ebook from the publisher for review consideration. This hasn’t impacted the contents of my review.
- Read An Inheritance of Ashes! It’s so good! ↩