The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Mark Lawrence finally spilled the beans in The Girl and the Mountain by revealing that all of his series were related. Then came The Girl and the Moon, the final installment in the Book of the Ice trilogy. In many ways, it was also the culmination of Mark Lawrence's entire body of work. Though it didn't provide all the answers we were looking for and it did raise its fair share of new questions, that novel was the one work that tied the Broken Empire, The Red Queen's War, the Book of the Ancestor, the Impossible Times, and the Book of the Ice series together.

And now comes the Library trilogy, a supposedly unrelated series. Could it be true given the epigraphs, or the veiled and not-so-veiled references to previous works found throughout the novel? After all, it's not the first time that Lawrence has made such a claim. Trouble is, the way the author set up his universe, both in time and space, everything he'll write from now on could well be related to the rest of his past series. Or not. Though The Book That Wouldn't Burn takes place in the same universe, there is a definite possibility that it has nothing to do and will never have anything to do with its predecessors. Still, Mark Lawrence created the perfect back door. The Library trilogy may not have anything to with the previous series, at least as things stand, yet the author can easily make it just another piece of his giant puzzle at any point in the near or distant future.

Here's the blurb:

A boy has lived his whole life trapped within a vast library, older than empires and larger than cities.

A girl has spent hers in a tiny settlement out on the Dust where nightmares stalk and no one goes.

The world has never even noticed them. That's about to change.

Their stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time. This is a tale of truth and lies and hearts, and the blurring of one into another. A journey on which knowledge erodes certainty, and on which, though the pen may be mightier than the sword, blood will be spilled and cities burned.

As is usually his wont, especially in the first volume of a new series, Mark Lawrence keeps his cards close to his chest as far as the worldbuilding is concerned. At the heart of this tale lies an infinite library containing all the knowledge ever written down. We soon find out that this library is connected to other such repositories across the entire known universe and across time itself. The implication behind such a need is that mankind, no matter where and when a certain technological level is reached, will always elevate warfare to a point where the species end up on the brink of extinction. And given mankind's inevitable quest toward self-destruction, can this cycle ever be reversed? But now that King Oanold has used the library's knowledge to prepare his country to face the ever-growing menace posed by the encroaching dogmen known as sabbers, is it already too late? Especially since the sabbers themselves desire that same knowledge to defeat the skeer, a mysterious enemy which drove them from their own lands. Some intriguing concepts Lawrence came up with include the Mechanism, the Exchange, and the Assistants.

The story unfolds through the eyes of two protagonists. The novel alternates perspectives between two protagonists. The first POV is that of Livira Page, a precocious girl from the Dust. Captured during a sabber raid on her village, she will be rescued by soldiers that will take her to Crath City. The second perspective is that of Evar Eventari, a young man who has spent his entire life trapped inside a part of the library with no exits. Alongside his four adopted siblings, he was raised by the Assistant. The supporting cast is made up of a number of interesting characters, chief among them the veteran trooper Malar (who may have Hunska blood) and the enigmatic Yute.

A number of themes are explored in The Book That Wouldn't Burn. Thought, memory, knowledge, xenophobia and its repercussions are all part of this tale.

The Book That Wouldn't Burn is Mark Lawrence's longest work to date and this isn't necessarily a good thing. In the past, the author was always concise and none of his scenes were overwritten. Unfortunately, many sequences featuring Livira are seemingly superfluous or longer than they needed to be. This in turn impacts the pace negatively, especially in the first half of the novel. Everything moves rather slowly and not much happens for quite some time. Lawrence makes up for it in the second half, it goes without saying. He brings this one to a satisfying close, but with another damned cliffhanger ending that might not please everyone. Then again, if you've been a Mark Lawrence fan for a while, you're probably used to it by now.

The Book That Wouldn't Burn marks the beginning of what should be another compelling fantasy series. And given the finale, I'm curious to see where Lawrence will take us next.

The final verdict: 7.75/10

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You can read an extract from the novel here.