The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“The books they were lost with in the Mechanism had tutored them, left them with skills honed to the sharpest possible edge. Clovis the warrior, Kerrol with access to the levers of the mind, Mayland with his histories. Evar had emerged with nothing, just the sense that something had been torn from his memory, leaving a chasm so wide he could fall into it and never be found.”

The contrast between Evar and his siblings shows his sense of inadequacy when he compares himself to them. The other canith siblings have emerged from the Mechanism with tangible skills, but Evar has ostensibly gained nothing except a yearning to find the woman from the book, who is later revealed to be Livira. This longing fundamentally drives his character arc throughout the story and is representative of the struggle to find meaning amidst limitations.

“It had never been her aunt’s expectations, or the sabbers’ rope, or the unvoiced threat of the soldiers that had imprisoned her. It had been the fact that she was lost—she’d been lost her whole life, bound to the one point that she understood. And now? Ignorance still held her captive.”

Livira’s character arc focuses on her journey from ignorance to true understanding. Her upbringing in an isolated village in the Dust has left her unprepared for the wider world, but now that she has come to Crath City, she must face the reality of her ignorance and find a way to remedy it. However, while she is beginning to see the walls of her prison, she does not yet truly comprehend their nature.

“Kindness carries a weight; it’s a burden all its own when you have nothing. Some undeniable part of Livira wanted to bite the hands that offered so much so freely. Pride is stupid, pride is blind, but pride is also the backbone that runs through us: without pride there’s no spring-back, no resilience.”

Pride is neither foolish nor arrogant for Livira, but an essential tool for survival in a world where trust is costly and resources are scarce. She fears that accepting kindness will compromise her autonomy or put her in a position of dependence. Her pride sustains her, enabling her to withstand the pressures of a world that might otherwise overwhelm her. In her reluctance to accept help, she preserves a sense of self-determination.

“You’re the glue that keeps us together. You must know that […] Unlike me, you actually like people, or would if you had the chance.”

Starval’s words to Evar shed light on the fundamental role that Evar himself plays within the sibling group. This scene therefore highlights an important aspect of his identity. While Evar lacks the specialized talents that the others possess, his capacity to feel and empathize makes him special, and this ability will ultimately compel him to form a connection with Livira and lead his siblings to freedom from their current prison.

“The library lifted us from the dust to what we have now in a handful of generations, and it can take us to the stars in a handful more. The power we have now came from the library and that power is wrapped in tradition.”

To those who have access to it, the library can offer possibilities beyond mere survival. However, this potential has spawned a complex mixture of rigid traditions that limit said access. Everything about Crath’s hierarchy, from the king to the lowliest resident, is reliant on what the library can provide. Thus, the library becomes both a beacon of enlightenment and a tool of control.

“So, whatever I do, I’m a duster? It never washes off?”

As someone from the Dust, Livira is an outsider in Crath City, and in the eyes of many, she is barely better than the “sabbers.” In this scene, Livira finds herself deeply stung by this prejudice and its apparent permanence. She is affronted to realize that no amount of talent or accomplishment will liberate her from being seen as “other” or “lesser” than her peers. Ironically, although the library is ostensibly an institution dedicated to the elevation of knowledge and truth, it is also paradoxically tainted by the ideology of prejudice, and its books are used to uphold these societal biases.

“Isn’t this place here so we can read what we want?”

Livira’s question to the assistant shows that, for her, the library represents the boundless potential of knowledge. The simplicity of this perspective, as well as the question itself, belies the enormous complexity of the answer, as this is one half of the battle between knowledge and ignorance: the perpetual conflict that built the library and visits destruction upon it.

“The city you go down into is not the same as the one you climbed up from two years ago. They say that you can never go back and that’s true. We change and so the places we return to will not seem the same. But here it’s the case that the city has grown as much as you have. Ask yourself in the face of the remarkable speed of progress: where did we come from, where are we going, and—most importantly—have we walked this path before?”

The nature of the library and the inevitable city that grows around it is one of cyclical progress, but Yute warns against accepting progress as inherently good or linear. In this scene, he asks Livira to question the very foundations of the world that she is just barely learning to navigate: one that she assumed to be ordered and permanent. Yute’s words draw attention to the fact that when humanity fails to understand the mistakes of the past, these mistakes will most likely be repeated.

“An ocean of knowledge is apt to drown you long before it educates you. The art of learning was in selection, and while generations of librarians had ostensibly been cataloguing the collection to make it accessible, they had in fact been turning it into a vast puzzle, a lock whose key was held by those in power.”

This passage sheds light on a fundamental paradox of the library. Although it exists to preserve knowledge, access to its depths is simultaneously restricted. The labyrinthine form of the library itself gatekeeps those who seek information. However, the librarians also ensure that those without status or connections cannot access certain information, and they use this selective access to maintain their positions. Thus, while the library represents unlimited knowledge, its structure reflects The Political Impact of Censorship.

“For a long time, the warmth and the living silence, so different from the dead silence of the library, enfolded him. The pool became still; the air held its breath; the trees drank. This was a place without time.”

This passage contrasts the library with the Exchange. The “living silence” of the Exchange suggests a world that grows and breathes yet remains indifferent, while the “dead silence” of the library represents the stagnant, suspended reality that Evar has always known, where knowledge persists but life fails to flourish.

“All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.”

Livira’s writing to herself explicitly states the novel’s premise that selfhood is something inherently taken from others. In this view, an individual is an unstable conglomeration of what others perceive them to be and what they perceive everything else to be; thus, identity itself is fashioned into something that is always being changed and revised. The self, in essence, is a fiction.

“People don’t want truth. They say that they do but what they mean is that they want the truth to agree with them. Take ninety-nine books that say one thing and one that says the opposite. If that opposite was what the customer was hoping to hear, they’ll put their stock in the single volume. In this manner we learn more regarding human nature from closed books than from anything that might be written within them.”

This passage in Logaris’s words indicates that rather than functioning to uncover an objective truth, the library acts as a resource to confirm biases and affirm beliefs. The collection, while vast, is selectively accessible; some knowledge is hidden while some is restricted, and the leading political figures restrict public knowledge to serve their own interests. The curation of knowledge—not just what is shared, but what is withheld—therefore reveals more about an institution’s motives than does the information it disseminates.

“The library is our memory. It’s all that survives. Perhaps it’s part of us.”

In the novel, the library serves a dual role, acting as both a repository of knowledge and a harbinger of destruction. The library thus reflects the paradox of humanity’s genius and flaws, driving cycles of creation and ruin. Although the library preserves the knowledge that propels humanity to this limit again and again, it cannot prevent society from crossing this point. In this way, the library itself becomes an inseparable extension of the self-destructive aspects of ambition.

“So, we might still be in the Exchange for all we know. Seeing what we expect. Or a mix of what we expect and what the Exchange shows us.”

The Exchange acts as both a mirror and a theater for Evar and Livira, reflecting aspects of their psyches and desires. While Livira is correct in her assumption that the Exchange has altered the way they see each other, it also makes a statement about perception, which is influenced by personal beliefs, desires, and fears, implying that people see what they want to see.

“Things are so easy to see once you’ve been shown them.”

This passage comments upon the fact that what people see isn’t always real, as it is colored by subjective expectations, fears, and lived experiences. However, once the illusion is broken, there is no way to return to ignorance. For a very long time, the Exchange masked the reality that Evar is a canith, and this new understanding colors all of Livira’s memories and interactions with him. However, there is also an irony to this statement. While she defines the “truth” as the fact that he is a “sabber,” it is also true that he was someone who genuinely cared about her.

“Her book was a statement of faith in the future, not that it would be a good one necessarily, but that she would be there in it.”

The book that Livira has been writing in fragments is more than just a story; it represents her ability to imagine a future, however uncertain or bleak that may be, and her determination to leave a mark upon that future. In an environment where knowledge, survival, and identity are under siege, writing becomes an act of defiance and hope.

“He would find her again, knowing himself to be vile in her sight, and say his piece. She could reject him, or merely stab him in the chest, but at least there would be an honest parting between them, not one forced by sudden circumstance. And having lived his life within the confines of a library, Evar knew that endings were important.”

In a world dominated by violence and prejudice, Evar’s desire to connect with Livira is revolutionary. Despite the brutal histories between their peoples and the betrayal that she feels after the revelation about his identity, he still wishes to treat her as an equal, and that requires full honesty between them. To leave things unfinished, regardless of the outcome, would be unfair to both of them.

“But the truth is that I traded immortality for the chance to help you. And I gave eternity away because the death of so many Liviras and Evars living together in peace was a moment of shame deep enough to teach sorrow to a being as old as the library itself and with no time for moments.”

As a former assistant in the library, Yute was once detached from time and human suffering and has witnessed centuries of war and death. However, the destruction of the shared peace between humans and canith led him to change. This peace was nearly a break from the cycle of hatred and destruction, and its loss is a tragedy on a cosmic scale. In Yute’s eyes, Livira and Evar themselves are not unique; instead, they stand as an echo of what could have been and what might still be.

“He’d read that love was when the hurts of another became yours, every bit as sharp, even if you didn’t understand them. He didn’t understand what this man—he would call him a man—was to Livira, but he knew that he had to do something.”

Evar’s recognition of Malar as “a man,” rather than a “sabber” shows how his growing empathy has overwritten his upbringing and prejudices. He knows that simply ignoring Malar’s plight would be easier, but it would also mean betraying Livira. Love, as he conceives of it, is not only a connection to an individual, but a responsibility to serve that individual’s needs.

“Livira, paralysed in the moment, couldn’t release the book. It seemed bonded to her. Her fingers wouldn’t let go. Her heart didn’t want them to. She had poured herself upon those pages more surely than if she had spilled her lifeblood over them.”

Livira’s book has become more than a collection of pages that she wrote; it exists as an extension of her soul, representing her past, her connection to Evar, and her struggle for understanding and identity when faced with war and time. Her fear of letting it go is therefore a much larger fear of losing the part of herself that can endure and persist, even when everything else seems ready to vanish.

“Fiction captures more than facts do. That’s why the library keeps it. It’s the most important part of our memories.”

Fiction, in Livira’s eyes, is important not because it is literal, but because it holds the essence of people’s thoughts, dreams, and connections to one another. Because fiction taps into deeply important aspects of humanity, it is more “true” than objective yet disconnected facts. This is also a deeply metafictional statement about the nature of stories, and Mark Lawrence uses Livira’s words to Evar as a way to declare a broader truth that is applicable to the real world as well.

“Livira wanted to argue, but she couldn’t […] Putting herself inside the assistant had set her apart. It had started to sever the bonds that attached her to passing days. She might have taken possession of the assistant, but in another very real sense, it had taken possession of her.”

Livira has always defied restrictions, from library rules to societal boundaries, as part of her unyielding quest for knowledge and autonomy. However, once she possesses the assistant’s body, she begins to lose everything that made her not only human, but “Livira.” The library’s rules, once her adversaries, now impose themselves upon her. While she manages to overrule this process temporarily, as the earlier chapters with the Assistant show, she ultimately loses this struggle.

“It doesn’t matter how brave the prince is or how shiny his armor. It doesn’t matter how plucky the princess is or how unusual her hair might be. The fire comes and there’s no fighting it.”

Livira’s explanation to Evar about the tragic ending of her rewritten version of Rapunzel articulates her belief that despite their best efforts, tragic circumstances are sometimes beyond all control. This idea challenges the common trope in which courage and determination are always enough to overcome adversity. In Livira’s version, the princess dies no matter what the prince does. By extension, she is telling Evar that no matter how hard he tries to save her, she is already doomed.