Book review: The Book That Wouldn’t Burn

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is by Mark "Red Sister" Lawrence. I really enjoyed the beginning, but found myself disappointed by the end. Goodreads is enthusiastic.

The young-girl-growing-up-in-a-hard-world-with-secret-protectors is a familiar story but quite well done. The always problematic transition to "the real story" is as ever the difficulty, which Our Author doesn't manage to overcome. There's a nice twist at the end, where we find out where the Assistant and The Soldier have come from and why they look a bit damaged. But, time-travel never works.

Consider: Yute reveals to Livira that her rejection at the hands of the examiners was a test of them, not of her. And yet he learns nothing from their failure. Their failure, by the end, we clearly see is going to lead to the humans being locally wiped out by the sabbers. And yet his reaction is to remain on the sides, taking the easy course of being the wise elder who sighs for the folly of the world but does f*ck all to change it.

But the main failure of all the characters in the book - indeed, the book itself - is to realise that their main problem is tribalism; that they're only fighting because they look different; that fundamentally they are all just intelligent-beings under the skin. And so the solution would be to talk. Quite how Yute fails to see this and fails to make even an attempt to do anything about it is a mystery to me - well, other than it would upset the flow of the book, obvs. The reason for the waves of sabbers is only vaguely sketched in, as is whatever economy allows them to survive out in the wastes of dust, and yet be desperate to attack; Our Author is more interested in his Cycles of History that "inevitbaly" lead to alternation, rather than any attempt to make it plausible.

There are echoes of The Library of Babel, except it doesn't quite work like that... individual chambers are large; there are clearly many of them; they clearly don't fit into the physical world; but IIRC none of the characters think it might be infinite. It turns out that the chamber doors are keyed by race, but in an easily gameable way that makes that precaution pointless, but there are only two races... or perhaps we're in a local pocket with only two races. There's no attempt at an explanation of how The Library might work, or come into being. Given that it is a library, and therefore might contain such an explanation, that seems odd. And once you realise it is non-physically-local, it would be natural to attempt to find exits to other worlds; yet no-one tries to do that.

The Exchange is based on the wood between the worlds.

Whatever tech created all this, the current inhabitants are well below it. So we're back in a what's-the-point type situation, whereby all these people and their struggles... just don't matter, in a sense. I'm not sure I expressed that well.