“Your book and the hole it keeps cutting through time has started to break the world.”
Mark Lawrence’s trilogy of the eternal Library wraps up in Book three, with a conflict that has spiraled out of the Library and into all of history, everywhere.
The star-crossed lovers Livira Page and Evar Evantari are still searching for each other, while their friends and family members are scattered across time and space and possible realities. The war over the existence of the Library is in full swing, and everyone is forced to choose a side: save the Library, destroy it. Or, find a middle ground somewhere between an unlimited amount of knowledge available to everyone, or forcing civilizations to start from scratch and rediscover everything. Again. And it looks like the winner of this war is going to be whoever has possession of Livira’s impossible book.
And when I say impossible, I mean the titular book is a literally universe-ending paradox. Stories written by Livira (many of which she can’t remember writing during the centuries she spent in the body of an indestructible Assistant) on scraps and end-pages taken from books in the Library, carried to the Exchange – the temporal in-between place that links all versions of the Library – and transported to multiple points in the Library’s history, then buried under a tower of books for for who-knows-how-many years only to be found by the young Evar with a secret note for him to meet Livira, years before the book’s actual creation. The book contains its own realities, its own gravitational force. It’s very existence has been wounding the Library, creating the nightmarish Escapes that Evar and his family have been fighting from the Library’s blood. Just touching the book to the floor opens cracks in reality big enough for people to fall into, ending up who knows where.
“Information is like water—without it you won’t live long, too much and you’ll drown. And there’s a difference between truth and information.”
Lawrence keeps creating new viewpoints to tell the story from, and everyone’s separate stories bounce across time, echoing each other and weaving together like a braid. Livira’s group ends up centuries in the past, trying to find the book and return to their own time while meeting a familiar face and getting caught up in one more war in the endless humans-versus-caniths-versus-ganar cycle. The ganar Celcha is on a centuries-long quest to atone for the genocide she helped to commit, or at least understand the “why” of what happened. Evar is thrown together with his two siblings who are actively working to destroy the Library while he searches for Livira and tries to figure out what his brothers did to save him from his near-fatal wound in the end of Book 2. The mysterious librarian Yute is searching through realities for his third option for the warring factions, and he’s bringing Evar’s third sibling Kerrol along for the ride. And Evar’s final sibling Clovis is just trying to survive, and help Livira’s librarian friend Arpix survive, and also slaughter all her enemies and maybe find a moment where she and Arpix can figure out just what exactly they’ve got going on between them.
Clovis, good lord, I have to take a moment to just talk about her. The towering canith warrior has been added to my list of bad-ass fictional women who are just fun to read. It’s not just that she’s a good fighter. Clovis is intelligent but bull-headed, unflappable, impossible to embarrass, definitely a touch crass, and the source of a lot of comedy in the book. She’s also a good fighter. And I mean a really good fighter, the kind that leaves onlookers standing in jaw-dropped amazement after she does a no-look walk away from the collapsing remains of a huge something (or a hoard of smaller somethings) that she just took down in an absolute symphony of violence. The fact that she’s as attracted to the bookish Arpix as he is to her is just one of the many ways that she’s delightful.
The world of the Library trilogy has gotten even more complicated in the final book. In addition to traveling to different times and places, the Exchange can now take people to potential realities. Possibilities. May-have-beens, multiple ones for every possible location in space and time. Trying to find one book and several friends across an infinite number of places might seem to be a nuclear level of needle-in-the-haystack. Lawrence handwaives this away with the fact that the Exchange – and by extension the Library – doesn’t just make connections, it creates coincidences. Stepping through a door in the Exchange, or a fracture in the Library floor, or a portal that’s formed by the blood of an Assistant, will take someone to where they need to go to understand…well, whatever it is the Library needs them to know. Add in the dream-like sequences when people fall into the pages of Livira’s book and you’ll have people cast as characters in a fairy tale. Or involved in a medieval-era battle between a king’s forces and nightmarish aliens from the moon. Or strolling through a landscape of book pages…
…or speaking with a young woman in pre-war Germany.
Anne stood looking up at the black silhouette of the library on a night of breaking glass.
The first two books of the series included a lot about how people dehumanize their enemies to justify atrocities. The final book definitely focuses on how would-be leaders create enemies out of thin air in order to seize power. Over and over, throughout history right up to the present day, there’s always somebody willing to single out one group and say, look, they’re the problem! They’re the cause of all suffering in our nation! This lie that I just made up about them? That’s the reason why good people shouldn’t have to put up with them existing! And if you think this is all a little too topical, remember that Lawrence started writing these books as early as 2022, long before “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”. Our current political dumpster fire is echoed by 1930’s Germany, by Crath City’s King Oanold (remember Oanold, the king who dealt with being stuck in a Library chamber by eating his prisoners alive), by entire civilizations that are happy to ignore actual dangers by dressing up the Other as the Enemy and making sure they get all the blame. And literally the only way it ever stops is when individuals learn about what’s gone before and learn to change their minds and see the completely foreign Other as a Person.
Which of course brings us to Evar and Livira. I’ve loved this love-affair since it was first knocking my socks off with how improbable it was all the way in Book 1. In a series that has included genocide, cannibalism, and a surreal image of the source of writing itself, their romance as they search for each other across time has remained a very sweet high point. There are so many parts of their story that I would love to see as fan art (if it wouldn’t spoil things for people who haven’t read Book 1 yet), and I was terrified going into this that we wouldn’t get a good resolution for them. No spoilers, but all endings are bittersweet, and the ending here is no exception. But it’s a bittersweet that’s created by an author that can take history and civilization and the concept of story itself and twist it into a pretty ribbon, and it’s one that’s satisfying while leaving just enough up to the reader to start making their own stories about what happens next.
Cover artwork by Tom Roberts