We fight for the people we love. We fight for the ideas we want to be true.

Evar and Livira stand side by side and yet far beyond each other’s reach. Evar is forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover her book if she’s to return to her life. While Evar’s journey leads him outside into the vastness of a world he’s never seen, Livira’s destination lies deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written.

And all the while, the library quietly weaves thread to thread, bringing the scattered elements of Livira’s old life – friends and foe alike – back together beneath new skies.

Long ago, a lie was told, and with the passing years it has grown and spread, a small push leading to a chain of desperate consequences. Now, as one edifice topples into the next with ever-growing violence, it threatens to break the world. The secret war that defines the library has chosen its champions and set them on the board. The time has come when they must fight for what they believe, or lose everything.

The Library Trilogy is about many things: adventure, discovery, and romance, but it’s also a love letter to books and the places where they live. The focus is on one vast and timeless library, but the love expands to encompass smaller more personal collections, and bookshops of all shades too.

This is book two of Lawrence’s Library Trilogy, exploring the concept of an infinite subterranean library through which one can access all the books (in whatever form) ever written by any species.

Through book one we had followed the two protagonists, Livira – brought up in the barren dust beyond the city of Crath that stands athwart the Library entrance, and Evar – living trapped in one of the library’s huge (2 mile square) chambers. Inevitably their stories converged as Livira in becoming a librarian explored the library’s darker reaches. Through those journey’s she came to meet Evar in a strange extra-planar space called The Exchange, where Lawrence drew inspiration from C.S.Lewis’s Wood between the Worlds in The Magician’s Nephew. The Exchange gave Evar and Livira access to visit other times in their own world and other world entirely, offering an interesting range of ‘first dates.’  In keeping with most laws of time travel, the past admits them only as ghostly witnesses rather than active shapers of events. Travelling into the future has different perils. That period claims them for its own, limiting their visits to what used to be their present to ghostly excursions into a newmade past.

At the same time hostile sabbers besieging the city of Crath in Livira’s present time overlaid Livira’s and Evar’s stories with a level of external threat that ultimately brought a conflagration to the library itself (although, as the title suggested, there was one book that wouldn’t burn). The ending of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn saw Livira’s enigmatic mentor Yute dispersing groups of survivors of the library’s partial immolation into slightly separated places and periods all in Livira’s future and Evar’s present.

Lawrence has explored some tangled timelines in his Impossible Times Trilogy, but the weave was more complex in The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. Evar and Livira encountered a mysterious but horrific tragedy in the past, which echoed the tragedy that had overwhelmed Evar’s community in the future leaving him and four sort of siblings as the sole survivors.  Evar and Livira also discovered they were separated not just by some significant differences of culture, time period and lived experience, but also of species. Sabbers was just a generic for alien or other. The Exchange had hidden from Evar and Livira that they were each sabbers to the other, Evar future descendant of the Canith who besieged Crath, Livira currently one of the human custodians of the city and the library. In its ending The Book that Wouldn’t Burn resolved some plot threads, played imaginatively with those time differences and also separated our protagonists creating more threads for the sequel to tie up.

In addressing those threads, The Book that Broke the World introduces two new point of view protagonists.

One is Livira’s friend and fellow librarian, Arpix who we knew from the first book, but who now takes a more centre stage role as leader of a group that found themselves flung far from the library’s catastrophe out into the dust, in a future time where the ferocious insectoid species skeer that were pressing hard on Evar’s Canith brethren have now  taken control of Crath and strive for access to different parts of the library through its doors each tuned only to open to certain species.

The other new perspective is Celcha – a slave digging an old site far back in the past when Canith and humans occupied Crath and the library in convivial partnership. Strangely that lost fraternity between the species of humans and canith did not extend to Celcha’s more diminutive species of furred and clawed humanoid, for Celcha is a Ganar born and raised in slavery by savagely cruel human masters. There is a contemporary poignancy there. Those who choose to dehumanise or ‘other’ another people find themselves freed from any restraint of conscience or decency in their potentially genocidal mistreatment. Ironically, as studies and quotes on the social media have emphasised, when we dehumanise others, we also dehumanise ourselves.

In that worst consequences of that endless human trait of tribal othering , the depth of that mistreatment creates not just martyrs but a hunger to turn the tables and exert some form of revenge. To be fair to Celcha and her enigmatic brother Hellet, their initial drive is for a more utopian equality, rather than an absolute reversal of positions. However, guided or misguided consequences of their efforts have Celcha flinging a furious reprisal far into the future, allowing Lawrence to tie two more threads into a neat bow.

Characters

It is perhaps telling that all characters – whatever their species – feel human, their otherness a matter of physical appearance and martial prowess, more than alien emotions or ways of thinking. Hellett the Ganar and Clovis the Canith both hunger for revenge in a recognisably human way. Evar and Livira’s inter-species love feels like an entirely human kind of soulful connection.

We see less of Malar the warrior and Yute the mentor in this book, although they do make significant appearances. However, Clovis steps up as a formidable warrior with a sardonic turn of phrase. When sniffing out an enemy, she reports

“Humans.” Clovis nodded. “Not close, but lots of them.”

“Define lots.”

Clovis licked her teeth. “My nose is clever. But it can’t count.”

Arpix too as the quasi-leader of the group dropped in the dust, gets to flower somewhat in the desert. There, lacking the Exchange’s universal translation, he ends up serving as a translator between human and canith exiles despite the abrasive difficulty in conjuring canith growls from a human throat.

“The irony is that speaking your tongue is torture on my throat at the best of times, and after being half throttles…” He coughed again and this time couldn’t avoid spitting.

It is perhaps some consolation that the solitary Arpix who had previously eschewed romantic liaisons of any kind, finds the events of the story throwing him in the way of love.

Plot

There is a tendency for plot and character sprawl in a middle book, as new threads and people jostle for position alongside established themes. Lawrence’s organic approach to plotting does lead to a couple of moments that appear a bit Deus ex Machina, or perhaps Deus ex Cattus, but Lawrence manages his narrative so that threads and characters converge in a satisfying way and within a volume that – at 369 pages – that comes in somewhat lighter than its 559 page predecessor.

Prose

Lawrence’s prose, is as ever, peppered with nice lines and captivating images. For example when Evar is being attacked by a giant animated statue that has pulled down shelves in the library

The automata came on, walking through book drifts over a yard deep, piling volumes before it in an ever-shifting bow wave.

Or here were Livira is under pressure to surrender her book and experiences feelings too familiar to any author

And now this assistant expected her to let not just any old book be destroyed. But the one and only one that she had written herself. If she had bled upon the pages and written every word in crimson the bundle she held to her breast could not be more part of her.

Lawrence again deploys epigrams to his chapters with effects that can be both amusing and insightful. Not least with that for opening chapter

“The greater tragedy of our world is not the victims of cruelty, but that so many of those victims would, given the opportunity, stand in the shoes of their oppressors and wield the same whip with equal enthusiasm.”

There was also this epigram that made me smile

“A hermetic seal will defeat nearly every invasion, be it virus, gas lor merely an unwanted draught. I will not stop an unwanted idea. To prevent the spread of any idea, true, false, ior untestable, one simply needs a compelling narrative to occupy the mind sof those you wish to keep ignorant.” Tyranny Without the Stick, by Vlad Putative

Themes

The library serves as an allegory for the internet, providing access to the knowledge of all the ages. This innovative world allows Lawrence to pose questions about how we use and abuse knowledge. Besides the old adage at the well of knowledge one should drink deeply or not at all, there is the challenge that information – selectively gathered, prejudicially curated, and maliciously disseminated can drive or fool anyone into doing anything. We live in an era of warfare not between simple knowledge and ignorance, nor even binary truths and lies, but a more complex battle ground between rational information and emotive mis-information.

Lawrence posits a dilemma between his library’s founders as to whether it is better to supply each society with the totality of all stored knowledge, or give them none of it – forcing every society to make its own discoveries. As Yute observes

“Some of you will have heard me speak of the fire-limit. The level of technology a people are able to reach before they burn their world down with it.”

This notion of a fire-limit might explain why the search for extra terrestrial intelligence has met only mute silence, with the technological capacity for inter-stellar being always contemporaneous with an unavoidable drive to technological self-destruction. Maybe climate change heralds our civilisation’s fire-limit.  This notion of a fire-limit is an argument for one side in the war between the library’s founders, withholding all  knowledge.

Yute himself is a purveyor of pragmatic compromise which also reflects the tortured politics of our contemporary times. Idealism in opposition changes much less than pragmatism in power, even though that pragmatism can reek of betrayal to those who can see with such clarity a more distant and far better place. As Yute says again

“I am fluent in more languages than I can count, but in none of them can age speak to youth. I say compromise- you hear weakness and cowardice. I say wisdom- you hear blinkered thinking, you see me hidebound, afraid of change. I say the solutions will be messy, unsatisfying and may leave both sides feeling dirty. You hear the call of distant trumpets. You see the vision of a future glittering on some high hill, raised above the murky swirl of warring faiths.”

In another sharp stab at contemporary issues, Lawrence puts Livira at the mercy of the idiotically mad but horribly dangerous King Oanold.

“I can’t. I just can’t. Please.” Livira hated herself for begging. She hated how this crude, stupid man had reduced her to a blubbering mess simply with his boundless cruelty. His methods took no cleverness, no wit, no skill and yet were as effective as a hammer blow to the head.

Livira echoes that dreadful frustration one experiences at seeing the power wielded by a unholy marriage of stupidity and conviction. It is not some hyper intelligent alien species we need to fear, but our own human idiocy.

At a time when the voices clamouring loudest on social media seem to have parked themselves at the peak of mount stupid on the Dunning-Kruger curve, a discussion about how we use and abuse knowledge is certainly timely. Lawrence skilfully teases us with those questions through a narrative filled with compelling characters, imaginative settings and elegant prose.

The Book That Broke the World is available now! You can order your copy HERE