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IFComp 2023: The Library of Knowledge, October 2, 2023The play within the play’s the thing to cache the context of the sting, so The Library of Knowledge nests its narrative inside a haunted echoarium. A library, with its trove of closed stories, offers an uncanny mediation in which the narrative’s desperate incantations can curl into a place outside of time, the breath between the storm: “The candlelight wavers, and then recedes, like an ocean flattening before a tsunami, twisting and turning through ribbons of bright emerald and heavy black smoke. Suddenly, it disappears, and you are cast into inky tenebrosity. You feel your breath exhale in the bitter, uncomfortable air.”
In this narrative layer that retains the immediacy of our engagement, we encounter the ancient spirit of Shaanxi, a primordial knowledge god, and beseech its library for answers to our questions, which, for a moment, are suspended unknown in the mist. If this sounds eldritch, as liable as Hermaeus Mora to opt into tentacles and terror, then The Library of Knowledge adeptly presses through the tropes to cast the scene to stronger, more compelling emotions: ““Sad?” Shaanxi gazes hazily away. “It did… for a long while I felt… lonely. I’d read every love story ever written, every ballad, every sonnet, but… I knew I’d never truly understand the ecstasy of being seen, the warmth of being loved. It was all just letters on a page, a vibrant world observed behind greying glass.” / “What changed?” You inquire. / “Well I suppose I realised something… Just like a mother loves her fresh-faced babe, I too love these small, funny, vibrant little worlds… And just as that newborn child will stare back at its mother, not being able to comprehend the vivid colours of her face or the workings of her brain, or how, when its older, it might call her cruel for not bowing to its every whim and whimsy, that child still loves its mother, its creator… in its own curious way. I do not need to be recorded in paper, for paper too will one day fade, but I am content if even tiny fractures of my existence remain in the memories of those who are worthy.” This touching combination of fear and heart pervades the library scenes to give it a lustrous sheen supernating the substance beyond tepid renditions of shadows upon shadows.
The strength of that combination supercharges when rilling through extravagant passages, like this one that builds nearly baroque in its transliteration of one sense into another: “Their piercing, visceral choir is constantly shifting… one moment it’s a harmony of wordless whispers slipping across oily scales or burning snakes writhing in agony, and the next it’s hundreds of mice scurrying across wet stone, and then it’s… is that laughing? Is it screaming? Is it weeping? The cacophony crescendos into a violent shrill that penetrates the deep of your skull, threatening to split your skin from bone.” Given how physical sound is, how you can feel music reverberating within you, this passage plays upon a twilight synesthesia primed to resonate within us. As with any combination, though, you have to remain careful, because it can easily trip too far in one direction and clatter the delicate mood, like this offnote joke from Shaanxi: “Hmm… ancient civilisation… world creation…doomsday…cheesecake recipes… Ah! The world of Elandris. Now, what specifically do you want to know?” But when it works, The Library of Knowledge enrichens its shadows with subtle shades of black in an oilslick rainbow gradient.
Which queues up the primary disappointment in The Library of Shadows, that this layer is just the uncanny mediation of nested narrative layers which prove not nearly as striking. In Shaanxi’s library, we read from two books: one about the world and one about the narrator’s life. The world book is just a loredump about a lightly fictionalized China and a heavily fictionalized Europe, a wiki summary made more egregious by the fact that most of this exposition ultimately holds zero bearing on the rest of the story. Like the provinces of the ersatz China are literally just Xinjiang, Jiangnan, Guangdong, and can stand in for themselves, while most of the original bits, like the Roselith empire, prove little more than backdrops. The entire world book could have been excised and you’d still more or less intuit the details.
As for the book of the narrator’s life, the strengths of the mediation layer’s prose rust, blunting into backstory blandness: “Over the next two months, Doi and Setsunai travelled by foot to reach the western border of Yanxia; the pair hiked over the winding waterways of Zhejiang, past the abundant rice fields of Jiangnan, through the blistering sands of Zinjiang, and into the rich coastal region of Shandong. / After some investigation, Doi concluded that the area most likely to facilitate her voyage would be the small town of Kowloon, which sat nestled in the Shandong caves. Due to the town being hidden away from nearby cities, and the convenience of being situated close by to the Spectral Ocean, which separated Yanxia from the west, the town had become a safe haven for criminal activities - specifically pirating and smuggling. / First, Doi visited the docks, and asked around for any spare work, citing their previous experience as a deckhand, but the townsfolk were suspicious of foreigners; they took once glance at Doi’s bright white hair and ignored her. So instead, Doi went to the tavern to play mahjong with the locals. She played precisely and shrewdly - winning enough to break even and then, as the locals began to complain, would fumble their next few games. Doi laughed alongside the locals as they all counted their winnings.” It feels more like someone’s relaying to me a story than telling me a story.
Given that these nested layers make up the majority of the story, ultimately The Library of Knowledge sags. Nevertheless, when it revels in its immediacy, The Library of Knowledge can spark out highlights that make the journey memorable. Even within the nested layers, pearls gleam that remind that, if the muddled whole remains inchoate, care and skill still enchant its turbid trundling.
