The Lies of Locke Lamora
Scott Lynch
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За изданието
- ИздателствоGollancz
- Град на издаванеLondon
- Година2007 г.
- ЕзикАнглийски
- Страници537
- КорициМеки
- Категория
- Тегло (гр.)382
- Ширина (мм)130
- Височина (мм)200
- Дебелина (мм)32
- ISBN9780575079755
Oceans 11 in a fantasy Renaissance Venice surrounded by sharks. At least, that was how The Lies of Locke Lamora was initially described in Luke Burrage’s review of the book on The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, and while he explained that this was only his initial impression and that the book ended up being different than that, it was enough to pique my interest. I don’t read a lot of fantasy. I’ve read Tolkien and studied the hell out of his medieval influences, and I’ve kept up with George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, but other than that I haven’t engaged the genre. Although this blog is dedicated mainly to Science Fiction, I do want to selectively branch out into more genres that fall under the banner of SF, and The Lies of Locke Lamora sounded intriguing and different enough to me to warrant notice.
The book is set in the city of Camorr, which sits on the southern coast of the continent. The city is built around a series of "alien" structures: towers, archways, bridges, and buildings made of a made of a translucent, seemingly-indestructible substance called "Elderglass," built by the long-departed Eldren. Camorr’s Duke, Nicovante, and the rest of Camorr’s upper echelon look out on the city from the heights of the five largest Elderglass towers. The rest of the city is very much like Renaissance Venice: it’s hot and humid, there are canals traversed by gondolas, districts built on islands, and various trading and commercial hubs. Renaissance Venice was a major trading hub, and thus a rich ground for cultural exchange as well as commerce. This is what made it such an interesting setting for writers like Shakespeare. It was rife with money, vice, and intrigue. Camorr, likewise, is teeming with exquisite finery and no short supply of thugs who want to steal it. It’s not an open field, however. All organized crime in Camorr is run through the Capa (read Godfather) Barsavi and his "Right People." When he came to power, Barsavi made an agreement with the constabulary and the nobility known as "the Secret Peace:" in return for a blind eye towards his own activities, Barsavi guarantees that no one under his rule will steal from the nobility or the city watch.
Enter into this mix an ambitous orphan named Locke Lamora, taken in as a child by the Thief Maker to be trained and eventually sold to another gang as a pickpocket. Locke, however, steals too much and draws too much attention for his master’s liking, so he is sold to another gang, the Gentleman Bastards, run by Father Chains (an older thief who has been conning the locals for years that he is a blind priest of one of their 12 gods). Normal gangs filch from commoners and merchants, use cat burglars and open intimidation or violence to make their scores, but The Bastards aren’t a normal gang, however. Oh no, Father Chains trains the Bastards in language, dialects, etiquette, disguises, and all the other facets of theater and the art of the long con; Chains trains the Bastards to steal from the rich in confidence scams, secretly violating the Secret Peace.
Lynch’s debut novel is a fun read. It’s got an evocatively described setting, lots of intrigue, and great characterization. I genuinely felt and cared for each of the major characters in this book. Coming off of a book of such bland characterization as Fiasco, this was immensely refreshing. It’s also well paced and full of great thrills. I consumed this book in audio format, and initially groaned at the 22 hour listen time. It turned out to be the quickest 18+ hour listen I’ve ever had. I was genuinely hooked. It’s not a deep book, though, and it’s not addressing any fundamental truths of the human condition, but it’s fun, and that does count for a lot.
The Right People and the Right Stuff
Characterization, setting, and tension-building. These are the three things that I think make this book so much fun. The main characters feel pretty well realized. One way Lynch accomplishes this is by avoiding the James Bond I’m-awesome-at-every-skill-known-to-man approach. The Sanza twins, Carlo and Galdo, are "Silver at everything and gold at nothing" to paraphrase Father Chains. Jean Tannen is an excellent fighter and, since he descended from merchants, good at sums as well. Locke is the bullshitter par excellence; he can ingratiate himself deeply with a target, get them to dance to his tune, and then go change disguises and do it again, all the while convincing the mark that he is two different people. In this way, The Lies of Locke Lamora resembles movies like Oceans 11: the Gentlemen Bastards’ confidence schemes involve a lot of planning and intricate theater to part their noble marks from their gold. What makes the characters believable is that they each have their limitations as well. Locke really can’t hold his own in a fight, Jean isn’t all that great at mummery (the theatrics and dress up), and the Sanzas can act and fight but not as well as Locke and Jean respectively. This plays a big part in determining how they will react to developments in the plot, but its not the only trait that defines them. Locke is audacious to a fault, Jean (while seemingly humble) can be in turns overconfident and overcautious, and the Sanzas are flippant more often than not. I was able to believe the character’s reactions to situations in the book, and I cared about what happened to them. By the end of the book, we know a decent bit about these characters as children learning the ropes and as adults pulling their own scams, so you have an investment in what happens to them.
What’s more is that the narrator, Michael Page, did a wonderful job with the voices and characters. When I first heard his voice, the way he rolled some of his r’s I was concerned that he’d come off as foppish and that I’d wasted an Audible credit on an annoying performance of the book. It gave me a bad flashback to when I started listening to the audiobook versions of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series that were narrated by Frederick Davidson, whose narration was far inferior to William Ganinara’s and which gave me the image of a snootily-dressed man trying to pretend he couldn’t’ smell a fart. Thankfully, though, Page demonstrated a wonderful repertoire of voices and his performance of the exposition was thankfully engaging.
Lynch’s description of Camorr was pretty darn vivid. It was an evocative blend of the familiar and the new (as a kind of twist on Renaissance Venice), and a refreshing change from the usual castles and townships of most Fantasy (or at least most Fantasy that I’ve read). I get the genuine sense that this is a city built on the water and whose waterways are the lifeblood of commerce and society. For example, Lynch describes extensive marketplaces and lavish parties conducted on a sprawling series of rafts and boats called "the shifting market" and "shifting revels" respectively. He also does some interesting things with the extensive network of Elderglass structures throughout the book, making them a clear and felt presence throughout. One particular use is the time he calls Falselight, which is when twilight rays catch the Elderglass and make them radiate light before the fall of true night. Here is an excerpt from the prologue:
As the first hint of true darkness seemed to fall over the city a new light rose faint and glimmering to push it back; this light gleamed within the Elderglass of the Five Towers themselves, and within the translucent glass of the bridge on which they were standing. It was an aura, waxing with every passing breath, gaining strength until it bathed the city with the fey half-light of an overcast day.
The hour of Falselight had come.
From the heights of the Five Towers to the obsidian smoothness of the vast glass breakwaters to the artificial reefs beneath the slate-coloured waves, Falselight radiated from every surface and every shard of Elderglass in Camorr, from every speck of the alien material left so long before by the creatures that had first shaped the city. Every night, as the west finally swallowed the sun, the glass bridges would become threads of firefly light; the glass towers and glass avenues and the strange glass sculpture-gardens would shimmer wanly with violet and azure and orange and pearl-white, and the moons and stars would fade to grey.
This was what passed for twilight in Camorr - the end of work for the last daylight laborers, the calling of the night-watches and the sealing of the landward gates; an hour of supernatural radiance that would soon enough give way to true night.
‘Let’s be about our business,’ the Thiefmaker said, and the two of them headed down into the Temple District, walking on soft alien light.
These and the more lavish descriptions in the book were very pleasing to me coming off of reading short stories in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, in which the authors have to do a lot with very little space.
As for tension-building, Lynch seems committed to the drama-building principle of piling upon your protagonist more problems than he can handle. As the novel builds to its crisis point and climax, it felt like there was no way Locke and the Bastards could get themselves out of the simultaneous jams they found themselves in, which helped defeat any sense of drag by keeping me interested. There was a point where I thought ok, maybe this is a few too many big problems for one book, but I think everything came together neatly in the end, at least for the opening volume of a series which this certainly is.
The Letdowns of Locke Lamora
The characterization, as I said, is great, but not perfect. We are kept at a remove from the characters via the third-person narration. Most of the time this is no problem. We’re not completely locked out of the character’s thoughts and feelings, but there are times when information is being deliberately kept from us for dramatic effect, which I understand but it still frustrates me a little. While most of it wasn’t a problem for me, sometimes it felt like a cheap dodge allowing Lynch to say "tada! Didn’t see that coming, did you?" The thing is, you know when you’re being misdirected, so it’s not so much tension-building as it is annoying or, at worst, insulting. Lynch comes off as either being coy at best or unduly manipulative with the narrative at worst.
This wasn’t the defining mechanism for the book and it doesn’t happen all that often, however, and by and large I could kind of understand why he chose to do it (but understanding is not the same as condoning or liking the decision). There was one pretty major element in the book that Lynch played coy with that I just could not forgive, and that is Sabitha. WHO THE HELL IS SABITHA!? Here is what I know about Sabitha: she’s a Gentleman Bastard, was recruited by Chains before Locke, has red hair, is away a lot, and was romantically involved with Locke before they had a falling out and she left. THAT’S IT! That’s all you know in the course of 700+ pages and 22 hours of narration. She left the city for some reason or another during the book’s present storyline, and is conveniently away on some mission/training/flower picking seminar/whatever during all of the flashbacks, so we never see her in a scene, which is just a bunch of BS in my book. She is one of only FIVE Gentleman Bastards, has screwed up Locke’s emotional balance so bad his relationship with all other women is tainted, and was one of Father Chain’s star protege’s. You can’t make such a huge character like that absent from the entire book! We’re never even given a good reason why she’s not there, Lynch just basically says go with it. No! I will not!
At first I thought it was going to be like Orson Welles in The Third Man. Welles plays the character that the protagonist is trying to track down throughout the whole movie, but he doesn’t show up until the last act of the film. Despite that, his character and his mystique has been built up throughout to such a degree throughout the film that it’s the few scenes with Welles in it that have become the most memorable parts of the film. I expected something similar here, that all this misdirection was just Lynch building to a Deus-ex-Sabitha with a big "tada! Didn’t see that coming, did you?" moment in which that mysterious missing Gentleman Bastard appears to save the day/complicate the plot/screw everything up/start a drum circle/whatever. Alas, no.
So why does Lynch do this? Well, my theory is based on the fact that he’s building a franchise with these books. We’ve all seen movies or read books that are guilty of shamelessly writing in or retconning new characters. I’m talking about those soap opera-ish moments of "Hey, I’m your long-lost brother" or "hey, remember me, that guy you have all that heretofore unmentioned history with and whom your readers are only learning about now?" This is often used to introduce throwaway characters or, when it’s done very badly, to shoehorn something new into the plot. I just read that Sabitha doesn’t actually appear until book 3, and I think Lynch wanted to set up that Orson Welles moment without making it look like he was retconning a big part of Locke’s past by writing in a heretofore unmentioned love interest. But this...is just not acceptable. If you want to keep a character underdeveloped in order to use him/her later, fine...but you still have to give us something more substantial than this. Given that this book covers such a wide swath of time in Locke’s past and present, Sabitha’s glaring absence feels like sloppy editing and planning. Or maybe he didn’t even know who the character was going to be at that point...
The book begins and proceeds for a bit like a traditional bildungsroman, or a story about the early years and rites of passage of the main character. Then it skips ahead to Locke running the show as the Garista (leader) of the Bastards. Some people may find these two elements, the young Locke and adult Locke, to make for a schizophrenic story that can’t decide if it wants to be about a youth learning the ropes or an adult in crisis. I wasn’t really bothered by it since I think Lynch wanted to balance that kind of close connection people get to young characters a la Harry Potter (albiet, a dirty, thieving Harry Potter in this case) without sacrificing a high-stakes plot of adult characters in crisis. It was his debut novel, and I guess he wanted to get as much of the story in there as he could to tantalize readers who have no idea who he is or what he could deliver. The slices we get of Locke and the other Bastards as children had a genuine and appropriate impact on the future storyline, and many different strands from both story-lines came together like a Dickens novel, but the omission of Sabitha from each and every one of these sequences is like trying to explain why Pip in Great Expecations is so angsty after you’ve edited Estella out of the story.
The book is set in the city of Camorr, which sits on the southern coast of the continent. The city is built around a series of "alien" structures: towers, archways, bridges, and buildings made of a made of a translucent, seemingly-indestructible substance called "Elderglass," built by the long-departed Eldren. Camorr’s Duke, Nicovante, and the rest of Camorr’s upper echelon look out on the city from the heights of the five largest Elderglass towers. The rest of the city is very much like Renaissance Venice: it’s hot and humid, there are canals traversed by gondolas, districts built on islands, and various trading and commercial hubs. Renaissance Venice was a major trading hub, and thus a rich ground for cultural exchange as well as commerce. This is what made it such an interesting setting for writers like Shakespeare. It was rife with money, vice, and intrigue. Camorr, likewise, is teeming with exquisite finery and no short supply of thugs who want to steal it. It’s not an open field, however. All organized crime in Camorr is run through the Capa (read Godfather) Barsavi and his "Right People." When he came to power, Barsavi made an agreement with the constabulary and the nobility known as "the Secret Peace:" in return for a blind eye towards his own activities, Barsavi guarantees that no one under his rule will steal from the nobility or the city watch.
Enter into this mix an ambitous orphan named Locke Lamora, taken in as a child by the Thief Maker to be trained and eventually sold to another gang as a pickpocket. Locke, however, steals too much and draws too much attention for his master’s liking, so he is sold to another gang, the Gentleman Bastards, run by Father Chains (an older thief who has been conning the locals for years that he is a blind priest of one of their 12 gods). Normal gangs filch from commoners and merchants, use cat burglars and open intimidation or violence to make their scores, but The Bastards aren’t a normal gang, however. Oh no, Father Chains trains the Bastards in language, dialects, etiquette, disguises, and all the other facets of theater and the art of the long con; Chains trains the Bastards to steal from the rich in confidence scams, secretly violating the Secret Peace.
Lynch’s debut novel is a fun read. It’s got an evocatively described setting, lots of intrigue, and great characterization. I genuinely felt and cared for each of the major characters in this book. Coming off of a book of such bland characterization as Fiasco, this was immensely refreshing. It’s also well paced and full of great thrills. I consumed this book in audio format, and initially groaned at the 22 hour listen time. It turned out to be the quickest 18+ hour listen I’ve ever had. I was genuinely hooked. It’s not a deep book, though, and it’s not addressing any fundamental truths of the human condition, but it’s fun, and that does count for a lot.
The Right People and the Right Stuff
Characterization, setting, and tension-building. These are the three things that I think make this book so much fun. The main characters feel pretty well realized. One way Lynch accomplishes this is by avoiding the James Bond I’m-awesome-at-every-skill-known-to-man approach. The Sanza twins, Carlo and Galdo, are "Silver at everything and gold at nothing" to paraphrase Father Chains. Jean Tannen is an excellent fighter and, since he descended from merchants, good at sums as well. Locke is the bullshitter par excellence; he can ingratiate himself deeply with a target, get them to dance to his tune, and then go change disguises and do it again, all the while convincing the mark that he is two different people. In this way, The Lies of Locke Lamora resembles movies like Oceans 11: the Gentlemen Bastards’ confidence schemes involve a lot of planning and intricate theater to part their noble marks from their gold. What makes the characters believable is that they each have their limitations as well. Locke really can’t hold his own in a fight, Jean isn’t all that great at mummery (the theatrics and dress up), and the Sanzas can act and fight but not as well as Locke and Jean respectively. This plays a big part in determining how they will react to developments in the plot, but its not the only trait that defines them. Locke is audacious to a fault, Jean (while seemingly humble) can be in turns overconfident and overcautious, and the Sanzas are flippant more often than not. I was able to believe the character’s reactions to situations in the book, and I cared about what happened to them. By the end of the book, we know a decent bit about these characters as children learning the ropes and as adults pulling their own scams, so you have an investment in what happens to them.
What’s more is that the narrator, Michael Page, did a wonderful job with the voices and characters. When I first heard his voice, the way he rolled some of his r’s I was concerned that he’d come off as foppish and that I’d wasted an Audible credit on an annoying performance of the book. It gave me a bad flashback to when I started listening to the audiobook versions of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series that were narrated by Frederick Davidson, whose narration was far inferior to William Ganinara’s and which gave me the image of a snootily-dressed man trying to pretend he couldn’t’ smell a fart. Thankfully, though, Page demonstrated a wonderful repertoire of voices and his performance of the exposition was thankfully engaging.
Lynch’s description of Camorr was pretty darn vivid. It was an evocative blend of the familiar and the new (as a kind of twist on Renaissance Venice), and a refreshing change from the usual castles and townships of most Fantasy (or at least most Fantasy that I’ve read). I get the genuine sense that this is a city built on the water and whose waterways are the lifeblood of commerce and society. For example, Lynch describes extensive marketplaces and lavish parties conducted on a sprawling series of rafts and boats called "the shifting market" and "shifting revels" respectively. He also does some interesting things with the extensive network of Elderglass structures throughout the book, making them a clear and felt presence throughout. One particular use is the time he calls Falselight, which is when twilight rays catch the Elderglass and make them radiate light before the fall of true night. Here is an excerpt from the prologue:
As the first hint of true darkness seemed to fall over the city a new light rose faint and glimmering to push it back; this light gleamed within the Elderglass of the Five Towers themselves, and within the translucent glass of the bridge on which they were standing. It was an aura, waxing with every passing breath, gaining strength until it bathed the city with the fey half-light of an overcast day.
The hour of Falselight had come.
From the heights of the Five Towers to the obsidian smoothness of the vast glass breakwaters to the artificial reefs beneath the slate-coloured waves, Falselight radiated from every surface and every shard of Elderglass in Camorr, from every speck of the alien material left so long before by the creatures that had first shaped the city. Every night, as the west finally swallowed the sun, the glass bridges would become threads of firefly light; the glass towers and glass avenues and the strange glass sculpture-gardens would shimmer wanly with violet and azure and orange and pearl-white, and the moons and stars would fade to grey.
This was what passed for twilight in Camorr - the end of work for the last daylight laborers, the calling of the night-watches and the sealing of the landward gates; an hour of supernatural radiance that would soon enough give way to true night.
‘Let’s be about our business,’ the Thiefmaker said, and the two of them headed down into the Temple District, walking on soft alien light.
These and the more lavish descriptions in the book were very pleasing to me coming off of reading short stories in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, in which the authors have to do a lot with very little space.
As for tension-building, Lynch seems committed to the drama-building principle of piling upon your protagonist more problems than he can handle. As the novel builds to its crisis point and climax, it felt like there was no way Locke and the Bastards could get themselves out of the simultaneous jams they found themselves in, which helped defeat any sense of drag by keeping me interested. There was a point where I thought ok, maybe this is a few too many big problems for one book, but I think everything came together neatly in the end, at least for the opening volume of a series which this certainly is.
The Letdowns of Locke Lamora
The characterization, as I said, is great, but not perfect. We are kept at a remove from the characters via the third-person narration. Most of the time this is no problem. We’re not completely locked out of the character’s thoughts and feelings, but there are times when information is being deliberately kept from us for dramatic effect, which I understand but it still frustrates me a little. While most of it wasn’t a problem for me, sometimes it felt like a cheap dodge allowing Lynch to say "tada! Didn’t see that coming, did you?" The thing is, you know when you’re being misdirected, so it’s not so much tension-building as it is annoying or, at worst, insulting. Lynch comes off as either being coy at best or unduly manipulative with the narrative at worst.
This wasn’t the defining mechanism for the book and it doesn’t happen all that often, however, and by and large I could kind of understand why he chose to do it (but understanding is not the same as condoning or liking the decision). There was one pretty major element in the book that Lynch played coy with that I just could not forgive, and that is Sabitha. WHO THE HELL IS SABITHA!? Here is what I know about Sabitha: she’s a Gentleman Bastard, was recruited by Chains before Locke, has red hair, is away a lot, and was romantically involved with Locke before they had a falling out and she left. THAT’S IT! That’s all you know in the course of 700+ pages and 22 hours of narration. She left the city for some reason or another during the book’s present storyline, and is conveniently away on some mission/training/flower picking seminar/whatever during all of the flashbacks, so we never see her in a scene, which is just a bunch of BS in my book. She is one of only FIVE Gentleman Bastards, has screwed up Locke’s emotional balance so bad his relationship with all other women is tainted, and was one of Father Chain’s star protege’s. You can’t make such a huge character like that absent from the entire book! We’re never even given a good reason why she’s not there, Lynch just basically says go with it. No! I will not!
At first I thought it was going to be like Orson Welles in The Third Man. Welles plays the character that the protagonist is trying to track down throughout the whole movie, but he doesn’t show up until the last act of the film. Despite that, his character and his mystique has been built up throughout to such a degree throughout the film that it’s the few scenes with Welles in it that have become the most memorable parts of the film. I expected something similar here, that all this misdirection was just Lynch building to a Deus-ex-Sabitha with a big "tada! Didn’t see that coming, did you?" moment in which that mysterious missing Gentleman Bastard appears to save the day/complicate the plot/screw everything up/start a drum circle/whatever. Alas, no.
So why does Lynch do this? Well, my theory is based on the fact that he’s building a franchise with these books. We’ve all seen movies or read books that are guilty of shamelessly writing in or retconning new characters. I’m talking about those soap opera-ish moments of "Hey, I’m your long-lost brother" or "hey, remember me, that guy you have all that heretofore unmentioned history with and whom your readers are only learning about now?" This is often used to introduce throwaway characters or, when it’s done very badly, to shoehorn something new into the plot. I just read that Sabitha doesn’t actually appear until book 3, and I think Lynch wanted to set up that Orson Welles moment without making it look like he was retconning a big part of Locke’s past by writing in a heretofore unmentioned love interest. But this...is just not acceptable. If you want to keep a character underdeveloped in order to use him/her later, fine...but you still have to give us something more substantial than this. Given that this book covers such a wide swath of time in Locke’s past and present, Sabitha’s glaring absence feels like sloppy editing and planning. Or maybe he didn’t even know who the character was going to be at that point...
The book begins and proceeds for a bit like a traditional bildungsroman, or a story about the early years and rites of passage of the main character. Then it skips ahead to Locke running the show as the Garista (leader) of the Bastards. Some people may find these two elements, the young Locke and adult Locke, to make for a schizophrenic story that can’t decide if it wants to be about a youth learning the ropes or an adult in crisis. I wasn’t really bothered by it since I think Lynch wanted to balance that kind of close connection people get to young characters a la Harry Potter (albiet, a dirty, thieving Harry Potter in this case) without sacrificing a high-stakes plot of adult characters in crisis. It was his debut novel, and I guess he wanted to get as much of the story in there as he could to tantalize readers who have no idea who he is or what he could deliver. The slices we get of Locke and the other Bastards as children had a genuine and appropriate impact on the future storyline, and many different strands from both story-lines came together like a Dickens novel, but the omission of Sabitha from each and every one of these sequences is like trying to explain why Pip in Great Expecations is so angsty after you’ve edited Estella out of the story.
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