The Book That Wouldn’t Burn (The Library Trilogy, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

‘There are no useless skills, girl. Only talents that have yet to find an application.’

She liked the well because it kept them all alive, but that wasn’t the only reason. In her mind it was a connection to another world, out of reach but most definitely there. A world where what they needed most was commonplace,

When the water was gone there would be a change. Not a good change. But a change nonetheless. And sometimes, in the dark of the night with the hollow sounds of the Dust all around and the bright stars cold in their heaven, sometimes what scared Livira more than the water running out was that the water would not run out and that this would be her life.

The historian must ensure that all their work is plainly marked as such, for if it were presented as a work of fiction its readers would clamour that it lacked sense, the events too implausible, too random, and too cruel. Truth will set you free … from certainty, comfort, and the beliefs upon which we rely for sanity … A History of Histories, by William Ancrath

The Mechanism’s pull was that while a reader’s imagination could animate a book inside their head, the Mechanism would build that world around you. It offered the contents of each book as something to be physically experienced, walked through, partaken in, interrogated, shared. You could immerse yourself in the book in whatever way you might desire. Over the centuries that Evar’s people had been trapped within the chamber the Mechanism had been their escape. Every generation or so someone who went in didn’t come out again. And even though on each of the five occasions on which such a tragedy had occurred, the victim had been a child of maybe eight or nine years, it seemed that the draw of the Mechanism was such that this was considered a price worth paying.

He had read many books about people who had escaped from prisons, each prison more terrible and impenetrable than the next. It seemed to him that what had set apart those remarkable individuals who did indeed win free was that they all had something to escape for rather than from. A reason to aim themselves at.

In short, any dream might be made real. But some dreams are dark.

‘Folks these days don’t have time for gods. Progress is the new deity.’

‘There’s writing on the cliff. High up. What does it say?’ Yute glanced out of the window then shook his head. ‘It’s a name. Meaningless graffiti written at great risk for an audience of dozens. Some people strive so hard for centre stage – bleed themselves dry for your attention – and when they finally get there and the lights find them, they discover that all they had to say is “I was here”.’ He frowned. ‘Though in truth, that might be an accurate precis of much of our great literature.’

‘The only relevant lesson I can find in the past,’ Evar said, reclaiming the conversation, ‘is that when things start to break, they get worse not better. A leak becomes a flood.

Some silences stretch, the tension builds and builds again until the suddenness of the inevitable snap. That’s the quiet which lies between people. Other silences fall like a heavy blanket, enduring so long that they become a second skin which can be punctured but never broken. Words are like wounds to such a silence, quickly healed over, quickly forgotten, leaving no scar.

But there was something about the number of choices that paralysed him. Rather like when it came to choosing a new book from the stacks. The knowledge that he couldn’t possibly read all the books on offer put a peculiar pressure on choosing his next read. There must be diamonds out there, the best book in a thousand, the best book in a million, and surely he didn’t want to waste his time reading one that was merely adequate when he could be reading one of those diamonds? So instead, he often wasted his time hunting for a read instead of reading.

The importance of ‘between’ is often overlooked in the hurry of getting from one place to another. In truth it is these interstitial spaces, which, in their linking of this to that and of now to then, might be considered a more fundamental layer in reality’s manifold.

People can be good or bad one by one. Society is almost always awful.

‘He said a story is a net. It can capture something as large as the spirit of the age or as small as the emotion of a man watching the last leaf fall from a tree, or sometimes both, and make one a reflection of the other.’

Livira had come to appreciate that an ocean of knowledge is apt to drown you long before it educates you. The art of learning was in selection, and while generations of librarians had ostensibly been cataloguing the collection to make it accessible, they had in fact been turning it into a vast puzzle, a lock whose key was held by those in power. A lock that kept them in power.

Master Yute had said that writing is an exercise in letting your mind wander but making sure that it keeps what it picks up on the way.

It seemed to Livira that there was a message in the way librarians demonstrated their rank with a shade of grey, white for juniors, shading darker with seniority. A symbolism concerning the way the fortress of facts that seemed so dependable, rather than being reinforced by the library’s endless knowledge, was in reality eroded by it, a sandcastle before the waves. The black and white of truth blurred into grey under the relentless assault of an infinity of context, interpretation, perspectives, and opinion.

‘Your friend Yute had thoughts to share on wealth. In his opinion, it’s not the gift of money that’s the greatest – it’s the gift of purpose. He said, and the fancy words are all his: all of us in our secret hearts, in our empty moments of contemplation, stumble into the understanding that nothing matters. There’s a cold shock of realization and, in that moment, we know that nothing at all is of the least consequence. Ultimately, we’re all just spinning our wheels, seeking to avoid pain until the clock winds down and our time is spent. To give someone purpose is to free them, however briefly, from the spectre of that knowledge.’

Many authorities declare the library to have been Irad’s work – but in truth it is the work of Irad and of Jaspeth and of neither of them. The structure that we are familiar with – or at least as familiar as a man may be with a possibly infinite building that reaches into many realities, many worlds, and many times – is something that neither brother would claim as their own. It is both far less than Irad’s vision, and far more than Jaspeth would have exist. It is, like every good compromise, displeasing to all parties concerned.

‘The library exists on the knife edge between their conflict – their disagreement. It hangs in a web of checks and balances. The library is both the tree and the apple. It offers not knowledge of good and evil but knowledge for good or evil. Of course fire could be forbidden. But one of the compromises that holds back the war – not your little one here, but the big one – is the agreement that if a civilization is not capable of keeping a book from burning then perhaps it wasn’t ready for whatever knowledge was held within.’

The main comfort in maintaining a journal is not that those who come after you may read through the progress of your life. Nor is it that, however faded, flexible, and fallible your memory may become as the tide of years washes over it, you will have this record to look back upon. It lies primarily in the illusion that were you only to press on at the end of this Tuesday and write your way into Wednesday, you would become the master of your life, subject to no bounds save those of imagination.

That was the compromise to stop the war – the library’s vulnerable, difficult, inconvenient, but eternal.’