This collection is an anthology of four short stories set in the world of the infinite library from The Book That Wouldn’t Burn and The Book That Broke the World (and the soon to be released The Book that Held her Heart). However, having said that – since the infinite library is connected (and can recover) every book ever written – the world of the library is something of a multiverse and its characters can slip between the library stacks and book pages to appear in some startlingly familiar environments.
Overdue
The first story features a cat that frequents three different bookshops and houses and is known by different names in each of them. A familiar motif for cat owners who must realise that their pet is, in true Vicar of Dibley style, capable of collecting three different Christmas dinners in three different households who all think they own the cat.
However, the three bookshops in overdue are connected not by a single street, but by the shady stacks of the library that penetrate their darkest shelves in a kind of ‘back of the wardrobe’ style portal (which is fitting really since other aspects of the main Library Trilogy pay homage to The Magician’s Nephew). Moreover, bookshops are not entirely separate since two share the same bookseller albeit at two different stages in his life – sometimes called Cole, sometimes called Nick. While the third bookshop, firmly located in a contemporary Edinburgh setting, with bookseller Marie, may seem least fantastical of the three – it has its own particular uncanny aspects.
But through the glimpses into the lives of these two booksellers and their passion for books, there is also a passion for writing and the desire to pen some words that might move a heart or two. Alongside that is a loneliness in that lost in books can also mean separated from the real human contact, as we see in this exchange between Marie and her sister discussing one fleeting customer.
“She was very pretty,” Sarah said innocently.
“She’s a child.” Marie snorted.
Sarah folded her arms. “Twenty-three if she’s a day.“
All the boys will be after her then.” Marie went to start straightening books as she always did when flustered.
“I’m sure she’s had all she wants of them. This isn’t a Jane Austen novel. We’re not in the 1810s.” Sarah came back to watch the book straightening. “And I know she’ll be back. So next time ask her name at last. And then-“
“As if I would take your advice on dating.” Marie sniffed.
In his introduction to the collection, Lawrence writes a few brief words about each story to explain what themes he was aiming to explore in writing them, adding the line on Overdue “and I also throw in a few personal stories with the characters.”
Returns
In Returns, Lawrence gives us a kind of Russian doll of nested stories, tied together by the book that not only connects them all, but is in fact, them all. To be honest it’s less confusing than I’ve made it sound. This is not quite a question of “one book, to rule them, one book to find them all, one book to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,” but it is about how a single book can touch many lives.
It’s also – importantly for those of us who loan out our precious books – about how even the books that change our lives must be returned to their owners eventually.
About Pain
A while ago Ash and I watched the film My Salinger Year (2020) about a young publishing intern spent a year working for the firm that had a editing contract with J.D.Salinger. Part of her job was reading the many, many letters to Salinger written by successive generations of angst-ridden teens who, on discovering Catcher in the Rye for the first time, found it spoke so eloquently to their troubled souls that they just had to write to the author.
In About Pain Lawrence toys with the impact of that seminal work with a character named Holden and a book named Catcher. However, rather than seeing how many different lives may at the same stage be affected by a single book, Lawrence considers how a single life may be affected at many different stages by the same book. Holden’s successive experiences of Catcher are moderated by characters from the Library trilogy who have managed to ‘write’ their way into his story of reading (and re-reading) that book.
I’m not a great re-reader of books myself – always a matter of too many books and too little time – but I did find a particular solace and enjoy making new discoveries in the one book I have read five times or so. However, Lawrence’s charting of how Holden’s sympathies for the characters of Catcher change with his own growing maturity offers interesting perspectives on how books can reveal how we have change. There is a saying attributed to Heracitus, “That you can never step into the same river twice” because the river (and the world) are in a constant state of flux – different times, different water etc. What About Pain teases out is that we can never read the same book twice, not because it has changed but because we have. As Barthes asserted in Death of the Author, each book is repeatedly fashioned anew in the space between the text on the page and the reader’s experience. Or – to put it another way – maybe I should re-read books more often!
Tabula Rasa
While Lawrence has previously published the other three stories as separate Library anecdotes, Tabula Rasa is an original story and worth buying the anthology for on its own. Early this year I read a fascinating book Why we die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality which touched on some of the research into how to delay, or even reverse, the aging process. One of the pick-ups from that was how the ultra-wealthy were deeply interested in this science, almost as much as in the science of establishing a colony on Mars, as they are determined not just to outrun, but also outlive the ruin that destructively extractive and exploitative predatory capitalism is making of our world and our society.
So Oanold’s demand, as relayed by Yute, has a particular contemporary resonance.“
In short,” Yute continued, “our beloved king has caught sight of his own mortality in the royal mirror and finds himself displeased with the prospect of death. He has requested that the librarians deliver some substantive texts on the subject of immortality.”
Three teams of librarians are set loose on the research task each aided by one of the barely renovated mechanicals from Master Heeth’s halls as a guide. As you might expect, Livira’s team take a slightly different angle on the research task. Also – in the malfunctioning mechanical they pick – Lawrence finds scope for humour amidst the pathos as Livira contemplation of the hubris and futility haunting their task.
Even works of brass and steel fell to pieces in time. Flesh followed that path more swiftly. Not only did their task seem hopeless, but she could think of no candidate for life everlasting less deserving than Oanold whose only qualification seemed to be that a single lifetime was insufficient for him to fully exercise the greed that defined him.
I am writing this having just read and reviewed Rob Hayes Blood Brothers Beyond, which also examines notions of immortality, and that was a theme in my own trilogy about the ways the rich and powerful might seek to escape death. (The review for this will go up soon)
In Tabula Rasa Lawrence delivers an inventive tale embedded in the familiar world of Livira and the library, weaving together strands of love and humour whilst showing that the only things that can be – or deserve to be – immortal are stories.
Julia Kitvaria Sarene