Mark Lawrence's THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T BURN

It's always the books you don't have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.

A new trilogy from Mark Lawrence is an inherently wonderful prospect, but one set in a giant, labyrinthine library that not only fills an entire hollowed-out mountain but whose inside is probably bigger than the outside and allows people who explore it enough to engage in a limited form of time travel? Aww, Mr. Lawrence, you wrote a(nother) book just for little old me? You shouldn't have. But I'm glad you did.

 



The Book that Wouldn't Burn is kind of set in the same world as Lawrence's Broken Empire pair-of-trilogies-and-some-sidequels*, but absolutely does not require any knowledge of those other books to enjoy. There are simply a few Easter eggs to tell us that the Library and its people exist somewhere in that world's timeline, plus the name of the city at the base of the Library's Mountain is Crath, as in Jorg of Ancrath. It might prove, in the projected next two books, to have more and more definite ties to the Broken Empire, but it needn't; they'd just be grace notes for Lawrence's fans, of whom I am one.

We explore this tiny-yet infinite world with one Livira, whom we meet as a little girl who shares a precarious existence with a kin-unit of maybe 40 people in a settlement out in The Dust, living on a meager bean crop carefully tended with water from a single well. We figure out quickly that Livira, nicknamed for a tenacious desert weed, is another avatar of the girl Lawrence likes best to write: smarter than her society expects or wants her to be, fierce, inquisitive and bluntly practical. Her perilous existence out in the Dust where she regularly gets into scraps with boys much bigger than she and fetches water from a well her settlement keeps having to deepen to continue its usefulness (and their survival) would be a fascinating study on its own, a Fremen tale without a sietch, like the original settlers on Arrakis, but Lawrence has different designs for little Livira.

For a start, humans are not/no longer the only sentient species on this broken earth, as we quickly learn when a vicious band of Sabbers (the word just means "enemy" in the common language of Livira's people) attack and destroy and round up all the human children they can find, whether to eat or sell as slaves, they're not telling, but no sooner has Livira discovered that at least one of them can sort of speak her language and has started annoying that individual with endless questions, than the Sabber train gets derailed by a loosely organized military or paramilitary band from Crath City, locus of the famous Library, to which it has always been Livira's secret wish to immigrate someday. 

Be careful what you wish for, etc.

Livira quickly learns that, while the Sabbers are regarded by Crath City's inhabitants and their King (who has everybody convinced he's descended from the original builder of the library and no, it is not possible to encounter mention of him and not wonder if he's an ancestor or descendant of Jorg of the first Broken Empire series) as barely more than animals -- it is Known that they interbreed with dogs, for example -- "Dusters" like Livira and her friends are considered hardly any more human; her kind are fit only to work and live in the city's sewers.

But of course Livira is not going to settle for being perceived or treated like that, and by the time she actually enters the city, she has already convinced one of her new captors, a man named Malar who quickly became my favorite character, that she might be worth a bit more to him if given a chance. Eager to be rid of this tiny pain in the ass, Malar steers her into the notice of a mysterious man named Yute. Yute sees her potential even more clearly, and picks her for a point-making stunt in the "Allocation" process that assigns young Crathians to their future roles in the adult world. When she then bulls her way into making an even bigger Point than Yute probably intended, she ends up as his latest protégé and a trainee inside the Library.

Interwoven with Livira's story is that of Evar, a young man who is trapped and has grown up, Piranesi-style, with four other children deep inside the Library itself, which is, of course, completely uninhabited and falling to ruin, but a Chamber within it has been semi-repurposed for human survival with a central pool and book-soil in which a small crop of foodstuffs can be grown. Evar and his siblings all emerged as young children from a mysterious Library device called The Mechanism, about which more in a bit, into which each had disappeared at various points in the distant past, not having aged despite having been missing for perhaps centuries. Alll, except for Evar, have come out of the ordeal with a preternaturally acute and useful skill set that amounts to superhuman expertise. One is a master psychologist, one the greatest assassin since the word was coined, another has most of the history of the world crammed into his head, and the group's only girl is a one-woman army, with a headful of tactics, strategy and weapons-lore that matches her homicidal hatred of the Sabbers. Evar, though, just has a hole in his memory and a vague notion that he spent his Mechanism-time with a beloved Woman whom he knew, even as a little kid, was his Destiny.

Evar and his "siblings" have been raised by strange and powerful android-like functionaries of the Library that reminded me of nothing so much as the bakelite robots who raise Ishmael the Cyclops Boy in B. Catling's Vorrh Trilogy, the Assistant and the Soldier. We learn much more about these two mysterious guardians as the novel unfolds, but that way lies way too much spoileration, even for this blog.

The Mechanism from which Evar emerged is a fascinating bit of kit, even for an infinite Borgesian Library: a person who enters it with a book winds up experiencing that book in a very direct and lifelike way that alters that person's character and experience of the world forever. This is how Evar's siblings all acquired their superpowers originally: they wen't into the Mechanism with authoritative non-fiction books under various circumstances (the one female in Evar's world, for instance, whose name is Clovis, was hidden in the Mechanism as a small girl with a Big Book of War Stuff right after watching Sabbers slaughter her entire family and kin-group and yes, Clovis is very much more like Lawrence's typical tough little girl and serves here perhaps to show us what Livira would have been like without the Library), and as part of their continuing education when the five of them came out of the Mechanism together, Evar's siblings have all continued to use the Mechanism to broaden and deepen their abilities. Evar, though, avoids the Mechanism, emotionally haunted by his lack of real memories of his experiences within it. The big difference we know of between Evar's and his siblings' Mechanism backgrounds is that Evar went into the mechanism with a novel.

Considerable space in the plot is devoted to the wanderings of Livira and of Evar through the fascinating mysteries of the Library**, which eventually bring them together, but once they're very tenuously together, Lawrence explodes both of their worlds in fascinating and (for me at least) surprising fashion. It is telegraphed early on that little Livira will eventually grow into Evar's mysterious dream woman, but none of that prepares us for how this develops; I thought I had anticipated the nature of the obstacles to their relationship but I was delightfully wrong! And the actual antagonistic forces pack even more of an emotional wallop than I'd been bracing for. 

There is also some of Lawrence's best prose-craft to date, as when Evar, freshly parted from Livira by cruel fate, contemplates how much she means to him:

...he could do nothing but love, need and want her. Whatever she looked like and whatever crimes her people had wrought, she was Livira, coiled around his heart, woven through his veins. He would find her again... at least there would be an honest parting between them, not one forced by sudden circumstance. And having lived his life within the confines of a library Evar knew that endings were important.

I haven't yet read everything that Lawrence has published -- for reasons beyond me, for instance, my local public library has yet to purchase either of the sequels to The Girl and the Stars -- but this feels like somewhat new territory for Lawrence's fierce skinny weed-girl heroine, whose relationships with other characters usually revolves around friendship and sisterhood rather than romantic love. He writes the latter as well as the former, all while also crafting my favorite kind of novel hands down: one that begs to be read again immediately from the beginning after a revelation near the end invites me to completely change my understanding of key story elements.

I really, really hope that Mark Lawrence and his crew at Random Penguin don't dilly dally too much in letting me back into the Library, is what I'm saying. I haven't been this tortured by the immediate unavailability of a book's sequels in a long, long time and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself while I'm waiting, besides, of course, read The Book that Wouldn't Burn again.

*Or at least it takes place in a world that can access the Broken Empire World via its Lewisian Wood Between the Worlds-esque "Exchange." And yes, Livira and Evar have some very Digory and Polly moments together there, but, as Livira eventually comes to discover, in whatever iteration of the old stories she is thinking, she herself contains both the Witch and the Princess, because Mark Lawrence is serious about his fantasy.

**The biggest of which are what it's really for and if it is a net good for the world or not. We come to learn that civilizations have destroyed themselves utterly in possibly planet-killing ways, over and over again, always with the help of the knowledge they recover once somebody discovers the Library. We just never seem to overcome the warlike side of our nature that leads us to harness knowledge for its destructive killing power, and this entire novel serves very strongly as an indictment of the alas, still very common, perspective that knowledge isn't any good unless it's practical, that culture and the humanities are useless and the people who want to study them are frivolous drains on society's resources, but Lawrence doesn't err on the side of "no, the humanities are More Important," just keeps firmly pointing out that knowledge without philosophy is dangerous as fuck.

Jeffrey Ford's THE PHYSIOGNOMY (Narr by Christian Rummell)

 Late last year the great Iggy Pop collaborated with Catherine Graindorge, an artist of whom I had not yet heard but of whom I am now a fan, on a song and a deeply affecting piece of video art called "The Dictator" which I think is useful to have in mind as we consider today's novel, Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy.

Like Graindorge's villain in the song, with "magic to turn the day to night," the dictator depicted in Ford's novel,  has magic to completely warp his citizen-slaves' perceptions of one another by having decreed that The Physiognomy, a species of phrenology in which it is the facial features more than the shape of the skull that is the Measure of All Things, is the only valid way to determine a person's worth.

Phrenology, which seems along with Flat Earth and Race Science and a lot of other odiously dumb beliefs we once thought safely Of the Past* seems to be making a bit of a comeback in our world, so it's perhaps a very good thing indeed that Cley, the physiognomist protagonist of the first book of Ford's Well-Built City trilogy is quite possibly the most immediately unlikeable narrators I've encountered since, well, the last student of phrenology whose story I read as one-half of Sarah Purcell's excellent The Poison Thread. Ford's creation, though, puts Dorothea in the shade early in his novel as, confronted directly with the appalling plight of one of his society's greatest losers, he shares very matter-of-factly with us a truly insupportable conclusion about the sufferer. 

The Physiognomy's narrator-character, sent on a mission to the back of beyond by the Master of the Well-Built City, has just seen a local yokel who has spent a life mining a substance called Blue Spire and is now in the final stages of being transmuted, while still alive, into the very substance the poor sap once mined**, which is the coal-analogue that makes the fabulous technologies that keep the Well-Built City running. As the pitiful figure, directly sent by the mining town's mayor to be observed first-hand by the Physiognomist, finally completes his stony metamorphosis before our protagonist's eyes, as the miner's own eyes startlingly shift to make contact in their last second of mobility before hardening forever, our guy says, right to the poor man's face, "perhaps you will heat my apartment this winter" and a moment later quips to a nearby worker that the miner needs dealt with as he "seems to have taken a stand." How droll.

The world Cley inhabits, though, is endlessly fascinating and a weird delight to explore. My favorite early example of this is Anamasobia's church, which sounds like... what if the fabulous Moria scenes from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring had been filmed on life-sized, practical sets and then used long after the filming is over and done as a vast and awesome temple to Aulë? And then used as a giant examining room in which to force a town's entire population to strip naked for minute inspection of their bodies, one by one?

Jeffrey Ford has a hell of an imagination, is what I'm saying. For this is a mere detail from a grotesque whole: the civilization that gave birth to Cley and formed his character is every bit as ugly as he assures us are the "inferior" faces and physiques he rejects. As in very. 

The Well-Built City is the creation in every way (even its currency is named for the guy) of the authoritarian, sadist mad scientist cum dictator called The Master, who deliberately sought out the most odious methods of social control he could find, turned them up to 11, and demanded that the upper crust of his society celebrate them constantly or risk his painful, even fatal, disapproval. Chief among these is "The Physiognomy": the only judgement worth making about a person (aside from their ability to toady up to the Master (but not so much as to annoy him, of course) is how closely they conform to an arbitrary ideal of physical Beauty. If you come reasonably close to it, you are judged intelligent, noble, moral, etc by virtue of your personal prettiness. If you don't conform, you are obviously stupid and criminal and possibly not fit to breed even if you're actually quite talented or skilled (not that you'd ever be given an opportunity to demonstrate or develop such talents or skills because you ipso facto don't have them if you're ugly). And yes, this means that the beautiful people in positions of power and responsibility are often incompetent morons. One way to make sure you're always the smartest guy in the room is to make sure no other smart people ever get to enter the room. 

And so our boy Cley, vain, shallow, cruel and arrogant as he is, wields a great deal of power via his calipers and nostril-width gauges and his bogus erudition about how the minute angle of one's eyebrow determines your ability to pour him a decent drink or whatever. His judgment determines all -- so the Master must hold some other power over such as Cley, which he does via a heroin-like drug called Sheer Beauty, a highly addictive hallucinogen that gives Cley hours of dreamy pleasure by making everything around him seem like an exquisite aesthetic experience only occasionally marred by imagined visits by, say, Cley's judgmental former mentor, whom Cley helped convict of a crime, the capital punishment for which was having his head exploded by means up a drug (invented by the Master, who is really a demented evil genius) that causes one's head to swell up until it bursts. Often this sentence is commuted by the merciful Master, though; most people who "should" have their heads blown up are instead sentenced to an exile at hard labor, though it's an exile with some almost pleasant aspects, as I'll discuss in a bit, as we discover when Cley runs afoul of the Master and gets the same treatment himself.

What's most fascinating about this world, though. is the ambiguity with which we must regard it, not just from sharing the point of view of a privileged and unreliable narrator given to long hallucinatory flights of fancy, but also when we try to assess to what degree this is a genuine fantasy novel in which magic is actually a thing, starting with, is the Physiognomy in any way real? By which I mean, is this a world in which its claims are actually true instead of being accidentally true through the force of belief? Has the Master some how made it actually true with his magic? Or has he just used his magic to convince everyone that it's true? Or, has he just successfully bullied everybody, the mundane way, into behaving as if they believed it until (fake it 'til you make it!) they actually believe it?

These questions become even more interesting when we learn that the Master literally created the Well-Built City from the ground up -- or, at least we learn that this is the dogma in which Cley and all of his fellow citizens believe. Or pretend to believe so they don't get their heads blown up. Can the Master actually blow up people's heads, though? He seems always to commute that sentence, at least within the confines of this narrative.

Dude sure blew up my head, anyway?

As for how the Master's sentences are commuted, it doesn't seem entirely terrible, though it, too, has some bizarre aspects that we can't be sure are real, coming to us as they are from Cley's skewed perspective. The person to be punished is banished to an island where he is to be set to work mining sulfur for the rest of his life. But this isn't a gulag like we might expect if we've read, say, Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, the accommodations seem kind of nice; the exile gets a room to himself in the island's only inn, with clean linen and privacy and a nice view, and he may, once his work shift is done, relax in the inn's bar, where he gets to enjoy the company of an incredibly intelligent and adept monkey who, among other things, "likes to play bartender" in the words of the only other inhabitant/inhabitants of the island that Cley meets, a guard who may or may not be two identical people, one vicious and cruel and the other friendly and kind. The cruel one plants an interesting narrative seed that some readers might already have noticed but I did not until this point, when he keeps telling Cley as he beats the tar out of the physiognomist that "the mine is my mind, my mind is the mine" -- suggesting that the Well-Built City might as much be a figment solely of the Master's mind and Cley just a figment within it, something that might be explored more in the book's two sequels.

There's so much more going on in this book, by the way. So much more. A bartending monkey is maybe the least weird thing we encounter. There is a representative of what may be a separate humanoid species, whose features both do and do not conform to the ideal Cley is charged with upholding to such a degree that they drive him a little bit crazier than he already is. There is a beautiful young village woman who is as ardent a student of The Physiognomy as ever there was, with whom Cley falls in love and then, Incel-style, punishes horribly when she is revealed to have a life and goals of her very own that don't include Cley. There is a giant of a man, Caloo, who falls into another punishment scheme of the Master's that reminded me of China Mieville's Punishment Factories in the city of New Crobuzon of which the Well-Built City was already reminding me before poor Caloo gets most of his internal organs replaced with clockwork/dieselpunk horrors. And there's the story's McGuffin, a mysterious White Fruit, the theft of which was Cley's original mission to solve. Supposedly the fruit conveys immortality to those who eat it, but does it really? The people who wind up eating it in this story don't fare too well after doing so.

There are, of course, two more volumes in the Well-Built City trilogy, but for reasons I haven't really been able to determine, I'm not rushing to read them the way I usually am. I do know that part of which is because The Physiognomy tells a perfectly satisfying self-contained story, with little to no pointing ahead to greater issues or further adventures the way, say, Ada Palmer's or the Dyachenkos' series did from book one. Its conclusion is open-ended enough to allow for continuation but isn't a cliffhanger, nor is it particularly a downer ending in need of uplifting by its sequels. I suspect that, really, though Cley definitely undergoes a great deal of character growth as he negotiates his new perils, he's still a thoroughly unpleasant person with whom to spend my time; while I feel for the little people in whose oppression he colluded for so long, I haven't been allowed to get to know any of them, trapped as I've been in Cley's repulsive head. Do I care about them enough to see how they fare in the aftermath of The Physiognomy? Right now, only in theory. I'm more intrigued, still, by their world, by the quest to find out how much of it as presented in this first book is "real" and how much is just Cley's addled understanding of it. Will the world as it really is be as interesting, though? I suspect that this is the question that may draw me to read Memoranda some day, and maybe even The Beyond. 

But, you know, I have an awful lot of other books waiting in a pile in my sitting room, on my e-reader, and in my audiobook library, and I don't at present feel inclined to postpone any of them to spend more time with Cley. Jeffrey Ford, yes, but not really Cley. Unless the Big Dictator someday forces me to.

*I imagine that even now some poor kid is enduring instruction in the art, though; it seems very much to be the sort of thing that The Indicted Guy might someday try very hard to promote as a means of regaining or holding onto power. He has already written off half the human race as useless except for intimately grabbing if we meet his standards of decorativeness.

**We have already been told, with chilling breeziness in audio book narrator Christian Rummell's perfectly supercilious tones, that miners whose families can afford to keep their stony blue bodies around as monumental decor, referred to as "Hardened Heroes"; our guy's hotel suite even features the owner's brother as a sort of human vanity stand. If a miner's family is less well off once the miner can't mine, though, the miner becomes a more consumable commodity. Hey, times are tough even in fantasy novels, man.