Review:
The Book That Broke the World, by Mark Lawrence
| Series: |
Library Trilogy #2 |
| Publisher: |
Ace |
| Copyright: |
2024 |
| ISBN: |
0-593-43796-9 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
366 |
The Book That Broke the World is high fantasy and a direct sequel
to
The Book That Wouldn't Burn. You
should not start here. In a delightful break from normal practice, the
author provides a useful summary of the previous volume at the start of
this book to jog your memory.
At the end of
The Book That Wouldn't Burn, the characters were
scattered and in various states of corporeality after some major
revelations about the nature of the Library and the first appearance of
the insectile Skeer.
The Book That Wouldn't Burn picks up where it
left off, and there is a lot more contact with the Skeer, but my guess
that they would be the next viewpoint characters does not pan out.
Instead, we get a new group and a new protagonist: Celcha, whose sees
angels who come to visit her brother.
I have complaints, but before I launch into those, I should say that I
liked this book apart from the totally unnecessary cannibalism. (I'll get
to that.) Livira is a bit sidelined, which is regrettable, but Celcha and
her brother are interesting new characters, and both Arpix and Clovis,
supporting characters in the first book, get some excellent character
development. Similar to the first book, this is a puzzle box story full
of world-building tidbits with intellectually-satisfying interactions.
Lawrence elaborates and complicates his setting in ways that don't
contradict earlier parts of the story but create more room and depth for
the characters to be creative. I came away still invested in this world
and eager to find out how Lawrence pulls the world-building and narrative
threads together.
The biggest drawback of this book is that it's not new. My thought after
finishing the first book of the series was that if Lawrence had enough
world-building ideas to fill three books to that same level of density,
this had the potential of being one of my favorite fantasy series of all
time. By the end of the second book, I concluded that this is not the
case. Instead of showing us new twists and complications the way the
first book did throughout,
The Book That Broke the World mostly
covers the same thematic ground from some new angles. It felt like
Lawrence was worried the reader of the first book may not have understood
the theme or the world-building, so he spent most of the second book
nailing down anything that moved.
I found that frustrating. One of the best parts of
The Book That
Wouldn't Burn was that Lawrence trusted the reader to keep up, which for
me hit the glorious but rare sweet spot of pacing where I was figuring out
the world at roughly the same pace as the characters. It surprised me in
some very enjoyable ways.
The Book That Broke the World did not
surprise me. There are a few new things, which I enjoyed, and a few
elaborations and developments of ideas, which I mostly enjoyed, but I saw
the big plot twist coming at least fifty pages before it happened and
found the aftermath more annoying than revelatory. It doesn't help that
the plot rests on character misunderstandings, one of my least favorite
tropes.
One of the other disappointments of this book is that the characters stop
using the Library as a library. The Library at the center of this series
is a truly marvelous piece of world-building with numerous fascinating
features that are unrelated to its contents, but Livira used it first and
foremost as a repository of books. The first book was full of characters
solving problems by finding a relevant book and reading it.
In
The Book That Broke the World, sadly, this is mostly gone. The
Library is mostly reduced to a complicated Big Dumb Object setting. It's
still a delightful bit of world-building, and we learn about a few new
features, but I only remember two places where the actual books are
important to the story. Even the book referenced in the title is mostly
important as an artifact with properties unrelated to the words that it
contains or to the act of reading it. I think this is a huge lost
opportunity and something I hope Lawrence fixes in the last book of the
trilogy.
This book instead focuses on the politics around the existence of the
Library itself. Here I'm cautiously optimistic, although a lot is going
to depend on the third book. Lawrence has set up a three-sided argument
between groups that I will uncharitably describe as the libertarian
techbros, the "burn it all down" reactionaries, and the neoliberal
centrist technocrats. All three of those positions suck, and Lawrence had
better be setting the stage for Livira to find a different path. Her
unwillingness to commit to any of those sides gives me hope, but bringing
this plot to a satisfying conclusion is going to be tricky. I hope I like
what Lawrence comes up with, but it feels far from certain.
It doesn't help that he's started delivering some points with a
sledgehammer, and that's where we get to the unnecessary cannibalism.
Thankfully this is a fairly small part of the tail end of the book, but it
was an unpleasant surprise that I did not want in this novel and that I
don't think made the story any better.
It's tempting to call the cannibalism gratuitous, but it does fit one of
the main themes of this story, namely that humans are depressingly good at
using any rule-based object in unexpected and nasty ways that are contrary
to the best intentions of the designer. This is the fundamental challenge
of the Library as a whole and the question that I suspect the third book
will be devoted to addressing, so I understand why Lawrence wanted to
emphasize his point. The reason why there is cannibalism here is directly
related to a profound misunderstanding of the properties of the library,
and I detected an echo of one of C.S. Lewis's arguments in
The Last Battle about the nature of
Hell.
The problem, though, is that this is Satanic baby-killerism, to borrow a
term from
Fred Clark. There are numerous ways to show this type of perversion of
well-intended systems, which I know because Lawrence used other ones in
the first book that were more subtle but equally effective. One of the
best parts of
The Book That Wouldn't Burn is that there were few
real villains. The conflict was structural, all sides had valid
perspectives, and the ethical points of that story were made with some
care and nuance.
The problem with cannibalism as it's used here is not merely that it's
gross and disgusting and off-putting to the reader, although it is all of
those things. If I wanted to read horror, I would read horror novels. I
don't appreciate surprise horror used for shock value in regular fantasy.
But worse, it's an abandonment of moral nuance. The function of
cannibalism in this story is like the function of Satanic baby-killers:
it's to signal that these people are wholly and irredeemably evil. They
are the Villains, they are Wrong, and they cease to be characters and
become symbols of what the protagonists are fighting. This is destructive
to the story because it's designed to provoke a visceral short-circuit in
the reader and let the author get away with sloppy story-telling. If the
author needs to use tactics like this to point out who is the villain,
they have failed to set up their moral quandary properly.
The worst part is that this was entirely unnecessary because Lawrence's
story-telling wasn't sloppy and he set up his moral quandary just fine.
No one was confused about the ethical point here. I as the reader was
following without difficulty, and had appreciated the subtlety with which
Lawrence posed the question. But apparently he thought he was too subtle
and decided to come back to the point with a pile-driver. I think that
seriously injured the story. The ethical argument here is much more
engaging and thought-provoking when it's more finely balanced.
That's a lot of complaints, mostly because this is a good book that I
badly wanted to be a great book but which kept tripping over its own feet.
A lot of trilogies have weak second books. Hopefully this is another
example of the mid-story sag, and the finale will be worthy of the start
of the story. But I have to admit the moral short-circuiting and the
de-emphasis of the actual books in the library has me a bit nervous. I
want a lot out of the third book, and I hope I'm not asking this author
for too much.
If you liked the first book, I think you'll like this one too, with the
caveat that it's quite a bit darker and more violent in places, even apart
from the surprise cannibalism. But if you've not started this series, you
may want to wait for the third book to see if Lawrence can pull off the
ending.
Followed by
The Book That Held Her Heart, currently scheduled for
publication in April of 2025.
Rating: 7 out of 10
In my 
A new release 0.0.4 of the 
During COVID companies suddenly found themselves able to offer remote working where it hadn t previously been on offer. That s changed over the past 2 or so years, with most places I m aware of moving back from a fully remote situation to either some sort of hybrid, or even full time office attendance. For example last week Amazon 
Version 0.3.15 of the 
I realize that because I have several chairs, the phrase my chair is ambiguous. To reduce confusion, I will refer to the head of my academic department as my office chair going forward.
Things developed since