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A review by ergative
The Book That Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence
3.5
This was fine. A bit sprawling. I found myself getting restless towards the end. I also struggled a bit with the characters. Evar and Livira's relationship wasn't really interesting enough for the eventual revelation about the Assistant to really hit home (although it was quite a well-constructed reveal). Oddly, I think that the biggest weakness of this book could actually have been addressed by writing more rather than taming the sprawl. Specifically, this book depends on an effective interplay between a vast, mysterious universe-spanning library, and the way the outside world interacts with it across time. The former was done really well. I've seen this kind of thing done before and felt that it was hokey and underdeveloped, because it's hard to make such a mystical library type of institution effective without addressing why/how such an institution could have been built. But this book grapples with it explicitly, acknowledges that it's a mystery, and shares with us the mythology and origin stories that have been passed down about the library, while acknowledging that they are imperfect and probably inaccurate.
No, where it falls down is the outside world. There are hints of politics, social structure, public discourse, and so on, but it's all filtered through the perspectives of the library crew who only leave the confines of the library complex rarely. But in order for the influence of the library on the outside world to land, we have to see the outside world, become invested in it, care about its fate. The fact that there is a world beyond the library's home city is mentioned but never made real. Even Livira's settlement in the Dust at the very beginning was more real in its chapter or two than the 400 pages of city that followed. I think I could have become incredibly invested in this book if it had sprawled more, given me more city and politics and external world building. As it was I found it hard to care whether the sabbers destroyed the city or not.
I have mixed feelings about the chapter-beginning epigraphs. They're all references to some real book, but refracted and distorted--the implication being that all books exist in one form or another across the universes, so the version whose extract we see will be a version of a book we know from our world. So we can recognize references to Narnia, A Tale of Two Cities, and so on, but the authors' names are scrambled. This was fine. However, there was one epigraph that was purported to be about the history of the city, and it refers to King Dubya, the grandfather of King Oanald, whose rule is governed by a desire to misuse the library in order to find justification for the policies he wants to make people accept as true, and it's just an unnecessary importation of American politics into a world that jarred and displeased.
No, where it falls down is the outside world. There are hints of politics, social structure, public discourse, and so on, but it's all filtered through the perspectives of the library crew who only leave the confines of the library complex rarely. But in order for the influence of the library on the outside world to land, we have to see the outside world, become invested in it, care about its fate. The fact that there is a world beyond the library's home city is mentioned but never made real. Even Livira's settlement in the Dust at the very beginning was more real in its chapter or two than the 400 pages of city that followed. I think I could have become incredibly invested in this book if it had sprawled more, given me more city and politics and external world building. As it was I found it hard to care whether the sabbers destroyed the city or not.
I have mixed feelings about the chapter-beginning epigraphs. They're all references to some real book, but refracted and distorted--the implication being that all books exist in one form or another across the universes, so the version whose extract we see will be a version of a book we know from our world. So we can recognize references to Narnia, A Tale of Two Cities, and so on, but the authors' names are scrambled. This was fine. However, there was one epigraph that was purported to be about the history of the city, and it refers to King Dubya, the grandfather of King Oanald, whose rule is governed by a desire to misuse the library in order to find justification for the policies he wants to make people accept as true, and it's just an unnecessary importation of American politics into a world that jarred and displeased.