I'm happy to report that The Book That Wouldn't Burn is both really entertaining, and also, you know, just generally a really good book. Lawrence has pulled out all the stops to make a new, interesting, compelling story, in a rich, vibrant world. It got me to keep turning pages long after I should've been in bed, and, more importantly, I didn't regret that choice when I dragged myself out of bed in the morning. Because this is, simply put, a good time, and if you don't take anything from the rest of the review, take this: go buy this book, go read this book, go enjoy this book.
Incidentally, for those of you wondering, the rest of the trilogy is already written, so you may as well start now.
Anyway. Appropriately for a story about books, much of it takes place in, well, a library. I say a library. It's more a cavernous complex, housed in the bowels of a mountain. Where travel times are measured in days. Where index systems for the contents are marks of power.. Where dross and society-changing concepts sit cheek-by-jowl, if you could manage to sort one from the other. The library is, I am saying, large. Maybe not quite large enough to have formed its own black hole, but I'm also not going to bet against it. And credit to Lawrence, he makes the library feel real. Indeed, it's almost a character in its own right. Filled with little rituals, day to day complexities, and of course, bureaucracy. Also filled with eldritch tomes, that researchers are trusted to go dig into the veins of, to find intellectual gold. You can feel the weight of history in the library, the way it changes hands between warring entities, from shifts in signage and doors that open one way or another. In the drifts of scattered paper and ash from old fires. The story excels at giving the library both a sense of place and a sense of age - a timeless ancient, a seeming rock before the ravages of time, it persists and changes on every glance.
If the library is the central rock of place in the book, it's worth mentioning the city that has accreted around it. And the scattered steadings outside it, all of which huddle against the rock of all the knowledge in the world. The politics of the city are driven by the necessity of defence against an implacable enemy outside the walls, and by the need to dig into the guts of the library to try and find a way to make the city safe. There's centuries worth of myth and legend there, structured around the gain and loss of knowledge, and centuries worth of treatises on war, successful and otherwise. The one who rules the city can decide how what they find is dispensed to the inhabitants, and that gives rise to its own tensions - as does the current staff of the library deciding quite how much it's going to hand over to the city government. Which is to say that there's a bigger world out there, outside the confines and claustrophobia of the library, and Lawrence manages to keep us aware of that around the edges of awareness. The world is real, even the parts we don't see, or see less often.
Anyway. There's people here too! Livira and Evar are our protagonists, our windows on a world wrought by and distorted by knowledge, and by the certainty that outside the city is an enemy that would happily tear everything down. Livira...oh, I have a lot of time for her. Literally and figuratively, as we follow her from a childhood escaping from the enemy seeking to destroy the city, into an adulthood within the library. Livira is smart, witty, and unafraid. If she's not going to be able to bludgeon an enemy to death with a novel, she'll be able to figure out a way to make them regret crossing her path anyway. Watching her grow, and move out of isolation into a space where people care about her, and she cares about them, is a delight, and also allows for some thoughtful meditations on the nature of loneliness, social expectations, and ways to deal with both. A woman with a penchant for risks, and for doing what she thinks is right, Livira is driven to succeed, to rise above a society that wants to keep her in her place. And she works on doing that by being competent, by being lucky, and by having friends. She genuinely is a lot of fun to read, as she tried to fit into a space that is built to hate her, and drives forward, trying to shape the world to avoid being shaped by it. How she does that, and the costs...well. Read and find out.
Evar, by contrast, is never really alone. someone with a handful of siblings, he's constrained more by geography, unable to leave the same space where he's spent his entire life. Evar is the second best at everything, and if he doesn't resent it, is perhaps frustrated by it. Evar is charming, and manages to be knowledgeable and deadly whilst also being so self effacing that he remains rather fun to read along with. In this he's helped by a trauma which has shaped his understanding of who he is, and by his siblings, all of whom are both ferociously competent in their own areas of expertise, and quite obviously struggle in doing anything else. They're all struggling to survive, trying to understand the mystery of where they are and why...which is how they intersect with Livira. I don't want to touch on this in detail, except to say that this is a story which travels through time as well as space, and challenges our assumptions about how those things impact on each other. Suffice to say that Evar is, if a little naïve, definitely likeable, and if his life has been blighted by the enemy that would devour everything he holds dear, he manages to keep that down to a dull roar.
Anyway. Our protagonists aren't the only people out there, of course. Though the focus on their intertwining fates, their isolation and loneliness, their passion and sense of truth and justice, are all vital to the story. But Evar has his siblings, rough and ready as they may be, and Livira has her gang of library colleagues and their superiors, some of whom are odd, some of whom are mysterious, some of whom are lethal, and some of whom are...all of the above. Its to the author's credit that every person we see actually feels real. They're alive and out there in a world that exists for them, where we just happen to be, strolling their stage for all the world like it's, well, all the world. There's a depth and flavoir and texture to even the most incidental characterisation that gives each individual more heft, more depth, makes them concrete and real.
Anyway. As ever, I don't want to spoil the story. But I will say it manages to be both sweepingly epic, and intimately beautiful. Occasionally it does both of those things at the same time. And it's really very clever, and emotionally affective and effective. It will make you Feel Things, friends. Be ready with the tissues. And be ready for twists, turns, and revelations, a couple of which definitely made me go "Ha!". This is, no doubt, Mark Lawrence at his best. It's a beautiful world, with some wonderful characters, and a story that keeps you turning pages until it's done, and then makes you want ot re-read it right away so that it isn't over yet.
Which is a very long winded way of saying, this is another great book from Mark Lawrence - go get a copy right now.
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