When I received Scott Hawkins' The Library at Mount Char from Blogging for Books, I had hopes that it would be an inventive, intelligent, high-concept fantasy. I mean, it does have the word "Library" in the title, and as a fan of Jorge Luis Borges, that alone is a draw. And then there's inside front cover copy, indicating "ancient customs" and the possibility that the plot deals with nothing less than the actual death of God. I'm a sucker for "ancient customs" and mythologies (I majored in anthropology as an undergrad and later taught mythology), and I'm inclined to be forgiving and generous when it comes to fictional representations of those subjects. But Hawkins' first novel owes more to the mythology of twelve-year-old fanboys, i.e., ugly and gratuitous violence, generally leading to explosions of varying degrees and dimensions, than it does to anything found in an actual or even invented library. And it's not the inventive recasting of the idea of a library that's the problem; it's the lack of a solid underpinning or grounding for the world Hawkins creates here. He does eventually get around to that, but not until the reader has slogged through 275 pages, give or take a few, of fairly mind-numbing carnage, much of it at the hands of David, a larger-than-life psychopath in a tutu who's generally described as covered in blood. Aside from that description, and the fact that he's unstoppable (until near the end), David's not really very interesting, just an oddly dressed variation on one of the evil Terminators from the movie franchise.
David has a sister, Carolyn, who's apparently the protagonist of the story, though she's another fairly flat character with few redeeming or even particularly interesting qualities. She's very smart and has vast knowledge (gleaned from the Library) of stuff regular people don't know much about, though her cloistered upbringing has rendered her fairly ignorant in the ways of the outside world, and she dresses strangely. But she's on a mission, so I suppose she can be forgiven her one-track mind. That mission concerns the probable death of God, who raised her and her adopted siblings (including David) in the Library; they refer to him as "Father," and like God (and perhaps some real fathers) he is the great mystery at the heart of this book. We could perhaps compare him to Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Perhaps.
Fortunately, Hawkins has given Carolyn a foil, Steven, the "American" she sort of loves (to the dozen "children" of the Library, all outsiders are "Americans"). We learn very late in the book that they have a childhood connection, but it's too late to save either their relationship or the novel. Carolyn puts him through all kinds of torments, but she does give him a lioness, Naga, so he's less alone than he might be while the world is going to hell. Steve's relationship with Naga is one of the very best things about this book.
The other intriguing character is Erwin Charles Leffington, an authentic war hero who served three tours in Afghanistan and then "decided he'd killed enough people," and now works for the Department of Homeland Security. Erwin, Steve, and Carolyn eventually become a sort of team, three musketeers against the bad guys, who include some of Carolyn's siblings and the U.S. military-industrial complex. (Most of the other characters eventually wind up as collateral damage.) Without Steven and Erwin, I doubt I'd have finished The Library at Mount Char.
If this book winds up being made into a movie, I might go see it. It has potential, given a good screenwriter and director - Guillermo del Toro comes to mind - who could emphasize the humanity of some characters who don't seem to really interest Hawkins, particularly female characters, who are thinly drawn, even Carolyn, who for the most part is just a killing machine with a sort of detached curiosity about others, whom she describes as "disposable." The visuals and special effects, though, should be awesome.
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