The secret war that defines the Library has chosen its champions and set them on the board

The fate of an infinite library hangs on one book, a book that holds the power to break the unbreakable. In the face of such forces, fragile things like hearts, family, and the world seem certain to fail.

The people most vital to Livira are scattered across time and space, lost, divided into factions, in mortal peril. Somehow, she must bring them together and resolve the unresolvable argument that fuels the library’s war. The bond between Livira and Evar has stretched and stretched again. Can it hold at the end, when things fall apart? Can it bring them together against impossible odds? This is the last chapter, the final page. The end threatens and no one, not characters, readers, or even the author, will emerge unscathed.

The Book

Lawrence’s prose is as elegant and evocative as ever while his plot swirls in fast and sinuous reels like a rollercoaster ride, at times threatening to unseat the reader (and maybe even the author!) yet still landing with feline surefootedness like Wentworth the cat.

My kindle notes are peppered as ever with observations of “Nice line” or just “Nice!” or even “Nice!!!!”

For example when Livira is contemplating grief and how the exigencies of a situation might fend it off for a while

“She found she could push it from her mind, leaving only a raw wound, filled with the knowledge that the sorrow would dog her until she stopped running, and then it would have its way with her.”

Or in how Lawrence evokes settings with fresh yet timeless descriptions

“It wasn’t cold for November, but it was still cold, and a mist was rising, the first of its tendrils questing among the bushes.”

“a tall canith lady with a tumbling purple mane and diamonds around her neck, shattering the sunlight into dazzling pieces.”

While the central narrative of characters, their relationships and their challenges remains utterly absorbing, the book strikes resonances in dimensions beyond the page as Lawrence weaves our own world’s sad history into a book about a Library that literally contains every story of fact and fiction ever told.

The crisis that consumes the Library has scattered Livira, Evar and their companions and siblings through all the pages of recorded histories. As Lawrence explored in his anthology of Library short stories, all bookshops and libraries have the potential for connection to that infinite Library buried in the mountain behind the city of Crath. The stacks at the back of a dusty booksellers can act like the coat-bedecked dark reaches of a certain famous wardrobe, providing portals by which one can enter or exit the infinite Library.

Thus, one story strand follows librarian Yute and Canith diplomat Kerrol as they find themselves transported to a foggy German town in the 1930s mired in all the prejudice, hatred and violence of that time. It is a compellingly described digression and the encounter between Wentworth the cat and some Nazis is every bit as satisfying as that between Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo and a vampire in Witches Abroad. Even so, the excursion into our history, gripping as it is, initially feels disconnected from the main struggles of Livira and her companions deeply embroiled in the various possibilities of their own world. However, in the denouement to the book – and the whole trilogy – Lawrence ties these threads together in a most satisfying way.

While The Library trilogy doesn’t exactly fit the romantasy subgenre, romance is a significant element in the unfolding plot with Livira separated from a wounded Evar and Arpix separated from an incandescent Clovis. Lawrence navigates the inter-species love stories with a sure hand – for both his Canith and Human characters are fundamentally ‘people’. The differences do lead to some amusing moments, not least the brief aside reflecting on the moment of consummation ‘the six breasts had been a surprise too’. However, love is love and Lawrence delivers it convincingly.

The worldbuilding stretches out into additional dimensions, first with Livira’s journeys taking her into a version of the past when the desert around Crath was a rich forest and later when Mayland finds an additional tranche of possible futures in the nexus of the Exchange, ascending invisible staircases to enter worlds of’ might have beens’ and ‘haven’t happened yets’ – except that some of them have.

That confusion of opportunities builds to an exciting climax in a throne room – perhaps one of many, overlaid in a palimpsest of possibilities – where our heroes’ reunions are fraught with danger and opportunity.

The Allegory

In Lawrence’s universe The Library is a myth that has permeated every civilisation – much as the biblical flood myth permeates our own human civilisation (possibly related to the world-wide experience of rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age).

Arguably the most distinctive feature of homo sapiens, and the trait that has contributed most to our domination of this planet is not the opposable thumb that enabled tool use, or the larger brain size that enabled planning, so much as the ability to communicate and to preserve that communication so each generation can stand on the shoulders of its predecessors.

With the library – the effectively infinite source of all information – serving as an allegory for our own internet, the story asks questions  about the value and danger of knowledge and the extent to which control and access of it should be centralised in any one pair of hands.

Lawrence’s library bleeds, and people’s fears turn its blood into their own worst nightmares – the monstrous escapes that hunt and destroy relentlessly. It’s a nice way of depicting the bleeding of random disordered information and misinformation through our internet which people’s hate and fear transform into destructive conspiracy theories.

George Monbiot in his book Regenesis highlights the dangers of reducing the number of nodes in the webs of interconnections that characterise our economy, our agriculture, even our political life. For example he cites our reliance on a small number of key crops as increasing the worldwide vulnerability to crop failure (a theme touched on in Steven Nolan’s Interstellar and explored with more grim reality in the Irish Potato Famine). A more diffuse web of varied agriculture would build in alternatives and redundancies that would allow us to navigate a way around any single disaster. However, humanity is becoming increasingly exposed to potentially catastrophic single point failures through our fondness for accumulating, amalgamating and aggregating human activity into huge corporatised bundles. We are told it is all in the pursuit of ‘efficiency’ and ‘economies of scale’  (for ‘economies of scale’ also read ‘opportunities for massive monopoly profits’)  Eg the big banks create financial crises, the big publishers – create originality crises (?!) and our reliance on a single node ‘world policeman to safeguard democracy’ becomes a  crisis when that world policeman suddenly pivots to an authoritarian anti-democractic gangster style foreign policy.

Lawrence’s Library trilogy poses the question of whether or not we can allow information and communication of that information to be condensed into a few nodes, a small number of gatekeepers and arbiters of truth, a handful of dispensers of information? Would such a concentration of power to control information be so dangerous as to make it better we had no information at all – that we went back to an information stone age? This then is the war within the library – whether to preserve and share everything, or to destroy it all (or as a certain Danish Prince might have put it, ‘to be or not to be?’).

The problem and its solution, as Monbiot would highlight in other contexts, lies not in the nature or the amount of information but in how we avoid an overly centralised model of management that leaves us to vulnerable to a single point failure – through accidental collapse or malicious corruption.

It is a dance between problem and solution that Lawrence elegantly explores with an ending that sweetly blurs the boundaries between life and stories.

The Resonances

All of Lawrence’s Library writings – long and short form – examine the nature of stories and of truth and how you can get lost in both.  Which is fitting really as – to quote  Albert Camus – Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. Certainly the pages of The Book that held Her Heart have a few truths to tell our contemporary times.

Given the two year lead time for any book traditionally published one can guess that this was written in 2023, but the relevance of its themes to this first half of 2025 is so apt that one might think Lawrence gifted with a prescience on the same scale as Nostradamus.

In one strand we have the Potentate ignoring the approaching Skeer threat and instead choosing to abuse and demonise an already marginalised community, whipping up hate and persecution as a deliberate policy of political distraction. To my mind this is like the hysteria around trans people that plagues contemporary media and political discourse whole the real and serious issue of the Climate Crisis is pushed from the front page status it really deserves and needs.

Livira frowned. ‘Why would a king…potentate whatever ignore a threat like that? It’s his cities, his land, his life, that are going to be lost’

‘He’s found advisers that will tell him what he wants to hear. That the bugs will turn north before they reach us. Take a hundred experts and you’ll always find a handful to dissent on any subject. The potentate’s chosen to listen to those ones.’

The comments on the potentate ring horribly true today

“This kingdom he has stolen, Is nothing to him but a weapon with which he might cut himself a larger empire. There is no bottom to his greed, no limit to the lives he will spend to feed it.”

 

George Marshall observed – in Don’t Even think about it: why are brains are wired to ignore Climate change – that facts and information don’t change people’s minds. But Lawrence’s Canith Historian Mayland elegantly articulates that key weaknesses in the human psyche.

Mayland stepped between Evar and Clovis. All around them the drifting pages rustled in an invisible wind. ‘Words are fine things, and pretty arguments can be made from them, but one thing I’ve learned in my travels is that they almost never change anyone’s mind, certainly not in the time that they take to speak.

or as Mark Twain put it “It is easier to fool a man than to convince him he has been fooled” because as Mayland (again) says.

“No. Changing your mind feels like being defeated. It wounds the ego. And our opinions were never founded on words-they’re just the garnish added on for show. A display of plumage to attract those of a similar mind.”

Through all the histories that the Library stories examine, there is the recurring theme of persecution and othering of vulnerable minorities for political advantage, a process that even the once persecuted can find themselves complicit in.

The chapter epigrams continue to amuse and entertain with some genuine quotes filched from Josiah Bancroft or Lawrence’s own works and others invented with thinly veiled references to real world situations and authors.  For example there is this one which seems especially relevant to our times

Boss levels have become a staple of many first-person shooters. They reflect the conceit that those directing some great obscenity should embody its evil and tenacity. The Wizard of Oz offers a truer perspective. We lift the curtain to reveal hollow gods.

The Winner’s book of Video Gaming by Ottis Cubed.

When we seem to be living in an age of hollow gods and killer clowns, Lawrence’s sharply observed writing once again entertains, informs and enlightens. The Book that Held her Heart is a book for our times, indeed for every time.