The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins (Crown Publishing, 2015)

The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins’s debut novel, isn’t interested in giving away an easy story. Information and back story are at a premium in this novel, and any bit of stable footing the reader can find is to be cherished. We jump to one-off or two-off POV characters at times, with little to no immediate justification. The story spools out slowly: Carolyn and her siblings, all of whom are adopted, are Librarians, each in charge of his or her own catalog. Carolyn, for instance, is in charge of the language catalog—she learns and studies every language ever spoken or written, including the languages of animals and storms. The kids are adopted at a young age by Father, a being who vacillates between an all-powerful demiurge and a seemingly spiteful parent, playing favorites and imposing his enigmatic will on his children. However, Father has disappeared at the beginning of the novel, which turns out to be both very good and very bad for our characters. What follows is their attempt, shown mostly through Carolyn’s perspective, to find him.

But that isn’t the story. Not really.

There are other narratives, too, of course: the kids all try to fit in with modern America in ways that are at times hilarious and way, way too on the nose. Other characters—Steve, a thief trying to stop thieving and become Buddhist; Erwin, a decorated war hero trying to figure out who Carolyn is—drift into and out of the story, but, for the most part, their narratives are supplemental to Carolyn’s.

The Library at Mount Char is full of the trademarks of really fun fantasy. It has a magical library, which begs a Borges nod, but fits just as well next to the Doctor’s TARDIS or the tents in Harry Potter. And there’s worldbuilding, huge swaths of it, worlds and alternate histories constructed out of nothingness and myth, beasts and lords and monsters from previous eras, beings of immense, arcane power silently battling one another behind the scenes. But Hawkins is sneaky about this worldbuilding; he mentions, he infers, he implies, but he’s abstemious in the actual exposition. He writes a cohesive enough fantasy to imply that there are rules governing it (he even, at times, offers a few of them), but he doesn’t get swept up in the minutiae of those rules.

And the characters all have their own specialties or abilities, all of which come together to create something holistic and complete. A character named David studies the war catalog, and his studies have turned him into a nigh-immortal warrior, lightning fast and deadly with any weapon. Another named Jennifer studies the medical catalog and can heal anything, including death, though she’s gotten a little fond of psychoactive drugs. A character named Margaret specializes in the lands of the dead, and she is often helped out in her trips there by Father:

For a year or so Father had been murdering Margaret two or three times a week. He did this in various ways. The first time he snuck up behind her with an ax at dinner, startling everyone, not least Margaret herself. After that it was gunshots, poison, hanging, whatever. Sometimes it was a surprise, sometimes not. Another time Father pierced her heart with a stiletto, but only after telling her what he would do, setting the knife before her on a silver tray, and letting her contemplate it for three full days and nights. Carolyn would have supposed that the ax would be the worse of the two, but Margaret seemed to take that one in stride. After a day or so of looking at the knife, though, she started to do that giggle of hers. And after that, she never really stopped. Carolyn sighed. Poor Margaret.

You can see the mythical lilt of Hawkins’s story here: the three full days and nights, the sense that all of this has happened before and will happen again, the notion that nothing is forever, nothing is final. Margaret is at once defined and circumscribed here; she’s the girl who goes over to the lands of the dead, and after a little while, all she can do is giggle like a character in a horror movie—exactly what we would expect. Each of the characters has their “thing,” and Hawkins goes so far to identify these characters solely through these “things” that the book moves completely into myth and allegory at times.

But this is where the real cleverness of The Library at Mount Char is. On the surface, this sort of essentialistic characterization sells the book as pretty typical fantasy. A reader could start looking around the fantastical Librarians and saying, “Ok, so you’re the muscle. And you’re the sentimental one. And you’re the brains.” Etc. It’s like a heist movie—assembling the team, tapping certain people for their certain abilities—except with magic! Or powers! Or something! Again, the book is really not too interested in telling us how/why these powers are.

And yet, the true joy of the novel is in the narrative Hawkins has so perfectly embedded in that seemingly basic, mythic story. Because one of these characters isn’t exactly who they say they are. And to really talk about how perfectly, totally well done this is, I have to reveal the character. So if you don’t want the reveal known to  you before reading the book, avert your eyes. Go make some tea or play with a puppy or make tea for a puppy or play tee-ball with a puppy or something.

Carolyn, it turns out, knows way more about Father’s disappearance than she’s letting on, but we find out early on that there are characters, some of them Librarians, who can sort of read minds. So Carolyn, our primary POV character, has to hide her knowledge from herself, which leads to some really interesting, really complex situations where Carolyn displaces her knowledge to physical ticks or odd mental tricks, things to distract herself. This is the real story of The Library at Mount Char. It becomes an impressive feat of information manipulation, of inclusion and exclusion, but it’s also an all-in storytelling strategy. Throwing your reader in the deep end at the beginning of a story is typical of a lot of fiction, and it might even be fair to levy criticism on Hawkins for keeping his readers in the deep end for too long. And even if that’s true, I never felt as though Hawkins had lost control of his novel; the strange ticks and errata along the way, the references to characters we never meet and events we never see—all of that stuff comes across as carefully curated clues parceled out by an author in complete control of his story. And when the reveal dawns on the reader, we get to make a joyous retroactive trip, adding up all of those seeming mistakes, running through the list of oddities for which we didn’t previously know how to account.

It may seem like an odd comparison, but I was reminded powerfully of Nabokov’s Pale Fire while reading The Library at Mount Char. Both books feature a cover narrative that slowly peels away to reveal something more insidious, something more complex beneath it. And part of the fun is that peeling away, but part of the fun, of course, is the urge to immediately go back and reread, to experience the book again with a fuller knowledge. And The Library at Mount Char certainly had me wanting to do that.