There is a book that is also a loop. A book that has swallowed its own tale. It is a ring, a cycle, burning through the years, spreading cracks through time, fissures that reach into its past and future. And through those cracks things that have no business in the world of flesh can escape.
Mark Lawrence continues his epic saga set in the eternal Library with a story of lost and found love, a revenge plot that lasts for centuries, and just a few of the abuses people are capable of when they’re a) desperate and b) convinced that the other side deserves it.
Let me tell you, it is really hard to go into detail about this book without spoilers, because so much of the previous book involved Lawrence’s ability to play with the reader’s preconceived ideas of what the hell was going on. He never quite lies about what it is you’re seeing, but there’s a revelation most of the way through the book that completely changes what everyone thinks has been happening. And then a little later he does it again, transforming a situation that had been established at the start of the book into something that casts an entirely new light on everything.
I really don’t want to ruin either of those surprises for anyone who hasn’t read book one, so, in the broadest possible strokes, here’s what’s happening at the start of book two…
Evar Eventari and his siblings (two of them, anyway) and several of Livira Page’s friends flee an invading army and the burning library, stepping through a portal in The Exchange and finding themselves (eventually) in the Dust, far into the future. They’ve got very little food and no way to access the Exchange in order to get back to their own time (and even if they could, the nature of the Exchange means people can only exist as ghosts in any time before the furthest point they’ve traveled). Worst of all, Crath City has been overrun by a species that may have been the ones driving the invading force to the city in the first place, just one more instance of the inescapable cycle of creation and destruction that seems to go back as far as the Library itself.
In an earlier part of that cycle – hundreds of years before Evar and Livira’s time – we’re introduced to a new character and yet another species, one that’s fallen very far from its origins. Celcha and her brother Hellet are Ganars, kept as slaves by the now-thriving Crath City and forced to work in a mine until they drop, excavating a long-destroyed section of the Library. A well-timed discovery and the help of two mysterious “angels” saves the siblings from the mine, but not from slavery. Celcha’s life becomes infinitely better than it was, but she can’t get past the fact that the treatment of the ganars is the rotten core at the heart of Crath City’s supposed Golden Age, and she has zero interest in forgiveness.
Her anger was the implacable heat of a planetary core.
Finally, Livira Page and her friend the old soldier Malar have taken a very long detour and are now ghosts, trying to find their way back to their friends and get their lives back. A cryptic comment from one of the Library’s Assistants convinces Livira that her book is the key; the book made out of stolen end-pages, filled with stories Livira wrote (many of which she can’t remember writing), with a note on the first page for Evar that was written thousands of years before they met. The book can somehow restore Livira and Malar, but it could also mean the end. Of everything.
You have written a wound into the world, broken laws whose age it would be meaningless to describe.
The three different viewpoints twist around each other, events echoing through time and letting the reader see things that have already happened, but through a different set of eyes and interpreted by someone who has their own preconceived notions of what exactly is going on. The nature of Livira – and Livira’s book – means that she and Malar end up traveling inside the stories she’s written, wandering through fantasy adventures and tales of romance while trying to figure out what the book – and the Library – is telling them.
And the Library itself is one of the best settings I’ve run into, fantasy, sci-fi, or otherwise. Miles-long, towering, underground chambers filled with an endless variety of what thousands of different races considered “writing” (“…knots in string, notches on sticks, collections of different shells threaded on cords, bumps and holes set onto thin sheets of leather…”). The doors into each chamber will only open for a specific species, so anyone walking into a chamber needs to be sure that they have the right people to get out again because being trapped in one chamber for centuries is definitely on the table. And there are all kinds of hazards waiting, along with enemy forces, and the eternal hazard of libraries – fire – and you can run along the tops of shelves but you’d better be prepared for “shelves” to mean something quite different depending on what chamber you’re currently fleeing across.
The poles supported circular shelves every couple of feet, from which various sizes offered their spines to all points of the compass. Clearly, the chamber had been fashioned for those with the power of flight.
This series continues to be something that I just fall into. There’s never a chapter where I was hoping the author would hurry up and get to someone else, because all of the characters and their stories are engaging. Evar and Livira’s romance continues to be delightful, in spite of (because of?) what we discovered about their natures in the end of book 1. Evar’s sister Clovis continues to be a bad-ass warrior, holding on to all of her pain and lashing out at everyone. So anyone who’s read book 1 will know how delightfully unlikely it is when she and Livira’s bookish friend Arpix start a relationship that baffles them about as much as it baffles everyone else. Evar’s brother Kerrol and Livira’s friend Malar were both the source of laugh-out-loud moments; they both act without hesitation and at one point Malar nopes out of a situation in a way that’s as violent as it is hilarious. Even the librarian Yute’s cat Wentworth makes an appearance, playing a surprisingly major role in the story. (I’ll give you this for free: nothing bad happens to the cat.)
But don’t think that this book is all light-hearted romance and entertaining dialog. Things get dark for everyone. Really dark. A lot of it is based on the attitude of “we are people and they are animals.” Groups are constantly dehumanizing their opponents to justify horrible things, to the point where they’re committing atrocities that not even animals are capable of. The nature of both “war” and “revenge” are questioned, wondering whether “winning” is worth the collateral damage to people who aren’t guilty of anything other than benefiting from a terrible system that they didn’t have any part in creating. And how do you decide who’s ultimately to blame for attempted genocide when everything is a reaction against the previous instance of genocide, going all the way back to the beginning of time?
But the biggest questions of the series revolves around the Library itself, and the conflict between its creator Irad and its would-be destroyer Jaspeth. Should knowledge be free to everyone, at any time, with all science and technology right at everyone’s fingertips? Or is that like giving a nuclear bomb to a playground bully? Should all civilizations instead be forced to collect their own knowledge, building their technology from the ground up every time, through things they’ve painstakingly learned rather than knowledge that’s been handed to them? Keep in mind that civilizations always seem to sort themselves into tribes, which means civilizations that start with ignorance will simply suffer more and take longer to arrive at the exact same total destruction.
Or is the librarian Yute’s solution the way to go, with the current version of Library? A collection of knowledge that only gives people access after hard work, long exploration, and cooperation between species. Instead of a binary choice between “information” and “no information”, it’s a choice of infinite compromises. Who gets to decide what knowledge is “safe”? If you have an infinite amount of books to choose from, how do you stop the person with the best access to those books from just picking the ones that back up what they already believe and then insisting that this is the truth? Information becomes just another way of control, of shaping individuals and entire civilizations. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that the Library and its method of letting people travel through time and space is also putting its thumb on the scale.
“The Exchange breeds and multiplies coincidence. It is part of its engine. The way it functions.”
Lies and misunderstandings and the Library’s not-so-subtle influence makes all of the stories come together in a dizzying tangle of cause and effect. Book 2 wraps up with a cliffhanger that’s even more perilous than the one at the end of Book 1, and not just because it isn’t entirely clear who’s survived to Book 3. The conflict surrounding the Library has escalated to a full-on war, and there’s a very good chance that friends, siblings, and star-crossed lovers are all going to find themselves on opposite sides.