“If a civilization is not capable of keeping a book from burning then perhaps it wasn’t ready for whatever knowledge was held within.”
Livira is a little girl living in a tiny, unprotected village in the dustlands. Evar Evantari is a young man who’s lived his entire life trapped in one library chamber with four (well, three now) siblings. Both Evar and Livira have the same fear: growing old and dying without ever seeing something new.
Within the space of a few days, Livira loses everything to an attack by dog-faced Sabbers who destroy her entire village. She then gets captured, is rescued, and somehow makes her way to a new life in the great library of Crath.
Many years in the future, Evar – mourning the loss of his memories of childhood and pining for a woman he knows is important even if he can’t quite remember her – finds an impossible book, written in a language he shouldn’t be able to read, which addresses him by name.
Evar! Don’t turn the page. I’m in the Exchange. Find me at the bottom”
The idea of an adventure set in a library so huge that librarians need to pack camping supplies before setting out to retrieve a book caught my eye right away. But Mark Lawrence’s fantasy novel is so much more than a whimsical fairytale, and a lot of that is due to its epic scale.
Evar and his siblings are the last of his people; their ancestors were refugees from a previous Sabber attack and trapped in the library for centuries. Their underground chamber is miles across, filled with towers and walls made entirely of stacked books. The four of them live off of crops planted in paper-mulch, and wear armor and weapons crafted out of leather book covers.
Their only view of anything outside their chamber comes from taking a book into the Mechanism, which will allow them to live the book and absorb all of its information. Evar refuses to use the Mechanism, because an occupational hazard of it is that sometimes people are just…held, without aging or feeling time passing. Evar stumbled out with four other lost children decades after they’d entered, with eight years of his memories gone. As the only one of his siblings who hasn’t become an expert in war, or assassination, or psychology, Evar’s only drive is to escape, which leads him to a place where the rules of time are different.
Meanwhile in her own time, Livira can actually experience things like sunshine in the city built into the side of the mountain, but her life is just as wrapped up in the great library as Evar’s is. Her natural inclination to find out everything about anything leads her on a quest to steal forbidden books, open secret doors, and find the young man she met as a child and lost when he saved her from a terrifying attacker.
The library is in every way the third main character of that book. And what you have to understand about the library is that this wasn’t something that mankind built, it was found. It’s existed from before recorded history. The chambers of the library extend into the mountain, further back than should be possible, larger than one city should be able to hold. Books aren’t organized by the librarians, they’re discovered through painstaking exploration. The sorting system changes every time a new librarian takes control, and it only reaches as far as they’ve been able to recatalog in a lifetime. Entire shelves are full of just indexes that have to be studied to see who was in charge when they were written and how much of it is still valid, and many of them are useless because they’re written in languages that have never been translated. There are chambers of wood shelves, of towering granite shelves, of metal shelves where every book is covered with a fine dusting of rust. An explorer who can make it into the previously-sealed chambers will find progressively stranger and stranger ways of “sorting” the books.
The first of these forbidden chambers, number 94 by the librarians’ reckoning, was a literal sea of books. Crossing it Livira hadn’t seen a single shelf, just an undulating ocean of books, as if they had rained from the sky and been swept up by unknown weather into drifts higher than houses.
The author is definitely the kind of storyteller that drops the reader into a brand-new environment and then gradually reveals the rules and the history and mythology, as well as just why the heck a library is the center of civilization. And Livira is the perfect character to be the reader’s eyes in all of this. She may not be entirely fearless, but she’s unstoppable and freaking clever. The book starts with her cheerfully brawling with a boy twice her size, she’s constantly asking questions even when surrounded by armed soldiers who have no reason to be kind, and she simply never hesitates. There are multiple situations when there’s barely enough time for the reader to realize what the very dangerous solution is before she’s already done it; my notes for those parts are variations of “AAAAA…okay I guess that worked.”
I’ve read a lot of books where the main character is thrown into a new life and has to prove herself to people who don’t actually think she’s worth much, but this one is a breath of fresh air. There weren’t any times when I was cringing on behalf of Livira, because she’s so damn determined to make a place for herself that there’s very little time for her to feel unsure or embarrassed. This is someone who was brought to the city not knowing what a library is, not knowing what a book is, and is only just starting to grasp the concept of writing. Fortunately she has a memory like a steel trap, and tends to leave people blinking in confusion because she knows math so intuitively that she doesn’t understand she’s being amazing, like, of course three hundred and seventy-three divided by eight is forty-six each with five left over, why would anyone need to check to make sure that’s correct?
There isn’t even a situation where Livira has to deal with mean-girl classmates, bullying older students, or relentlessly harsh teachers. She’s fearlessly forthright, always has a smart-aleck response ready, and breaks rules as a hobby. But she’s also fiercely loyal and even surprises herself with the friendships she makes. And that comes in handy when dealing with a ruling body that doesn’t think much of villagers from outside the walls (“dusters”), has zero interest in negotiating with the army of “animals” slowly moving towards the city, and uses the endless source of information of the library as a way of backing up what they already believe.
“Truth?” Master Logaris scoffed at the idea. “We deal in affirmation. People don’t want the truth. They say that they do but what they mean is that they want the truth to agree with them.”
You may not have noticed, but there have been a lot of attacks on librarians lately. The narrative has been about “protecting children”, but the actual goal seems to be “control the information”, and that theme comes up again and again here. The king isn’t just provided with history and philosophy, he’s given the correct history and philosophy, the books that confirm he’s already doing the right thing. Dusters are generally not allowed to be librarians, and aren’t given access to the best jobs, so people can point to them and say “look how stupid and lazy they are, why should we spend the effort and manpower to protect them from Sabbers?” It all puts me in mind of censorship, whitewashing, “doing your own research”, and the victors sanitizing history so people don’t have to feel bad about a terrible situation that could have been fixed decades ago.
And at the same time there might be such a thing as too much information. On the one side you have censorship and control, and on the other you have the need for MacGyver and Mythbusters episodes to leave out a crucial element when making an explosive, because if everybody has that information then it will be used by someone who doesn’t understand – or doesn’t care about – the consequences. Things in the city of Crath are moving too fast; new innovations in power and weapons are created every day, and scientists aren’t coming up with these through years of study, they’re pulling the information from books that the librarians discover. Books that were written long before the city was built. From civilizations that no one knows the history of because they collapsed too quickly for the history to be recorded. Which leads Livira to wonder: how many times has this happened before? And worse, is the process speeding up because the information is just too easy to get?
Would it really take a vengeful god to bring them all to ruin, or was it simply a case of handing sharp knives to toddlers and waiting for the bleeding to start?
This book has it all: deep philosophical questions about the nature of learning and perception. Physical comedy. Scenes that echo other works of literature, and subtle jokes hidden in the names of characters and the authors of the literature snippets that start each chapter (and which get progressively stranger as the library’s reach is revealed to be wider than anyone understands). The author paints dazzling images of the endless chambers of the library, and fight scenes involving people who haven’t had any way to pass the time other than learning to fight. There are nerve-wracking chases through the library, jumping across the tops of shelves, staying just ahead of an invading army that itself is being chased by FIRE. Love and trauma, and two people chasing each other across time. The story is a puzzle, with the answers hidden in plain view, except I never thought to ask the right questions.
Most of all what this book did was surprise me. This book is made of surprises: people’s reactions, last-second rescues, alien allies, betrayals, triumph, tragedy, an improbable love story involving time travel and a deliciously bewildering maze of cause and effect. There are things revealed that shed an entirely new light on everything that happens, which means you can get something new out of reading it a second time, which I highly recommend. Although there’s not a lot of time, what with the second book coming out in (checks notes) six days. So, y’know, better get on that.
Cover illustration by Tom Roberts.