55 pages • 1-hour read
The Book That Broke the World
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Background
Series Context: Mark Lawrence’s The Library Trilogy
The Library Trilogy represents a departure from the universes Lawrence has established in his other fantasy trilogies. Instead, he creates a new world with a vast and timeless library that becomes the site of a philosophical struggle and a locale that both unites and divides the people within it. Through this setting, the trilogy offers a contemplation on the power of story and the ability of books to connect cultures and peoples. At the same time, the series sparks debate on the uses of history, memory, and the lifespan of civilizations, especially civilizations built on fundamental conflicts between different groups of people.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, the first installment in the trilogy, focuses on the stories of protagonists Livira, a human girl, and Evar, a young canith male, as they mature and learn from one another. The novel explores the background and upbringing of both protagonists, including the nature of Evar’s life within the library chamber to which he and his canith siblings are confined. Livira and Evar meet through the library and over the course of many years, a romantic relationship develops between them, even though they meet infrequently.
Livira and Evar’s story continues in the second novel, occupying a narrative timeline that intertwines with the story of new characters Celcha and Hellet. Many of the characters who are prominent in this first novel become secondary figures in The Book That Broke the World, and the first book also alludes to an episode in the history of Crath City in which a disaster wiped out the entire population, which informs Celcha and Hellet’s storyline. The story of Celcha, Hellet, and the other ganar acts as a prequel to the events of the first novel, and the destruction is explored and narrated first-hand in ways that tie to the larger debate ongoing between Irad, the library’s founder, and Jaspeth, his rebellious brother.
The fundamental conflict over the future of the library and the appropriate use of its knowledge resources, which come into focus in the second installment, drive the conflict in the third book in the trilogy, The Book That Held Her Heart. In it, Lawrence continues his exploration of the lessons of history, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the mechanisms that cause conflicts within and between groups. Much of the plot focuses on the attempted reunion of fragmented communities, but a storyline involving a historical timeline set in Nazi-era Germany introduces further questions of censorship, propaganda, and manipulation of knowledge. Altogether, while the violence and thematic content position the trilogy within the grimdark subgenre, the central image of a vast and complex library connects to a long literary heritage that examines the nature and function of books, knowledge, and the power of story.
Literary Context: Books About Libraries
The Book That Broke Her Heart and entire The Library Trilogy series have their antecedents in a long tradition of literary conceptions of libraries as places of possibility, where the roles of knowledge, history, and memory become intertwined with questions about human relationships and the meaning of life. In this popular representation, the library is sometimes simply a setting or a device, speaking to its function as a place to bring people together. Michiko Aoyama’s novel What You Are Looking For Is in the Library celebrates this role of libraries as a place of human connection, not simply a place to exchange information, in the story of five very different people who all find solace and new hope thanks to their interactions with a librarian at a local community center. A similar theme pervades Freya Sampson’s The Last Chance Library, a work of contemporary women’s fiction. In Chris Grabenstein’s middle grade novel, Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, the library functions as an escape room and obstacle course through a game designed to teach its protagonists lessons about teamwork, cooperation, and creativity. Libraries also sometimes function in these novels to offer characters insight into themselves and humanity. Matt Haig’s fantasy novel The Midnight Library explores the imaginative capacity of libraries—his titular institution is a hub that provides versions of the protagonist’s possible futures as stories that help her discover lessons about relishing life.
Magical or otherworldly libraries proliferate in fantasy novels. In A.J. Hackwith’s The Library of the Unwritten, a library set in hell regards souls as characters in their stories, while in Margaret Rogerson’s Sorcery of Thorns, books hold the ability to transform into monsters, symbolizing the potentially destructive ends to which knowledge can be applied. The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins, shares a similar premise with Lawrence’s trilogy, with a cast of orphaned protagonists raised within a magical library by an ageless man called the Father, who requires each sibling to learn a specific set of skills. The library in Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library is, like Lawrence’s construct, an entity that spans time and space, staffed by librarians with supernatural powers. Like The Library Trilogy, Cogman’s series also interrogates relationships between groups by the various species of magical creatures that it introduces and classifies. Perhaps the most canonical work on libraries and the power of knowledge is the short story The Library of Babel by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. This story represents the library as a warehouse of knowledge but questions the ability of humans to translate or comprehend and, most importantly, derive meaning from a text. Lawrence takes up some of these same questions about the uses to which knowledge can be put and the wisdom of those who wield it in The Library Trilogy.
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