Scott Hawkins: The Library at Mount Char

[bibliogramma]

I'm still mulling over Scott Hawkins' debut novel, The Library at Mount Char, some time after finishing it. It's a compelling read, if you can handle the extreme blood-letting and sometimes calculated, sometimes thoughtless, cruelty, despite being thrown into the middle of things without any guidebook and an extremely unreliable narrator.

It's the story of a community of godlings, formerly ordinary children, raised by a cold, cruel, and demanding father - a being 60,000 years old who can alter time, raise the dead (useful if you decide the best way to discipline your adopted child is to burn him alive inside a hollow metal bull), and do a great many other incredible things, all before teatime. When the novel opens, Father is missing, and some unknown power has forced the godlings - librarians, as they call themselves, from the fact that their Father has required each of them to become expert in one of 12 "catalogs" of knowledge that he has written - out of their home, The Library. It slowly becomes clear that this is, intentionally or not, the trigger for a power struggle between the librarians, or at least those who believe they are capable of talking up the reins of Father's power.

The two main candidates are David, the master of the catalogue of war, and Carolyn, the master of the catalogue of languages. Yet despite their rivalry, they are at the same time co-operating, along with their brothers and sisters, each one a master of some catalogue of knowledge, in trying to find out what has happened to Father, and what is keeping them from the Library. Bearing in mind, always, that it might actually be one of them, or another of the librarians, behind everything.

It's also the story of two somewhat unusual men who are drawn into the apparent chaos - Steve and Erwin. Both are men with ambiguous pasts, one chosen - perhaps at random, perhaps not - by Carolyn, and the other a special government investigator who has noticed some of Carolyn's activities in the world beyond the Library and is on her trail.

Hawkins has done some fascinating worldbuilding here, drawing on theological and cosmological theory imagery from many cultures to create a unique view of time, the universe, and godhead. It's also an examination of the ethos of divinity, and as such, leaves many questions unanswered.