Book: The lies of Locke Lamora
Oct. 13th, 2009 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Scott Lynch (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scott_lynch)
Details: (c) Scott Lynch 2006; Pub 2007 Gollancz; ISBN 0-57507-9754
Verdict: The lies of Locke Lamora is a fun and original adventure set in the criminal underworld of Fantasyland.
Reasons for reading it: I've heard lots of people enthusing about Lynch recently.
How it came into my hands: Newcastle-under-Lyme library.
I can definitely see why The Lies of Locke Lamora is so popular; this is one of the most readable books I've come across recently. It would be easy to make it sound generic, but although its general outline isn't startlingly original, it does everything it does superlatively well. I think this is about as good as swords-and-sorcery gets.
The worldbuilding is really solid, you can really believe that Camorr is an actual city in an actual continent. It has an economy, a history, fashions, social strata, everything, yet the book is never didactic, the narrative never bludgeons you with how clever its ideas are, all the background fits smoothly into the story. It's really atmospheric, and I loved the incidental details of a vaguely pre-industrial civilization living in the ruins of an ancient ultra high-tech one. Magic works, but it's coherent and fits into the worldbuilding and seems to be driven by something other than the needs of the narrative.
The characterization is lovely; I have a soft spot for snarky protagonists, but Locke is plausible as well, he doesn't speak as if he were scripted. There aren't clear-cut good guys and bad guys, but multi-faceted people with complex motivations. The book is almost too careful to avoid stereotyping, but even though it's occasionally a little too earnest, for the most part it succeeds because every single minor character mentioned has a past and a personality and is more than just a generic innkeeper or thug or pawnbroker or whatever. The setting is one which is sexist but not so skewed that women are reduced to mere background scenery.
If I were being really picky I might say that the story is a little slow to get started, but only the tiniest bit, and within a few dozen pages it's highly dramatic and action-packed. The technique of cutting between the present, with Locke and his gang caught up in a world-threatening contest among the super-powerful, and his childhood and how he and his companions got to where they are, works surprisingly well. And the central contest is really well done, you can both believe that The Grey King is almost ultimately powerful, and that just the right alignment of circumstances makes it marginally possible for our heroes to thwart his plot. Major characters die, and the outcome has very real costs, partly because tLoLL is setting up for a sequel but mainly because the level of threat is very well balanced. I love the way that swordsmen can win extremely unequal fights, but not come out unscathed and require a lot of luck to do so.
The only minor quibble I have with tLoLL is that it has a rather positive portrayal of torture, but it's hardly based on real world morality anyway. Also, I was slightly annoyed by the way that the geography is only very, very thinly disguised from being European, right down to the fact that the inhabitans of "Camorr" have Italian-ish names and mafia-like mores. You could say that the book suffers a little from some of the minor irritations typical of American authored books set in pre-modern not-Europe, but that's a very small point.
It occurs to me that it would be quite hard to describe tLoLL so that my description wouldn't also apply to Brust's Jhereg series. (There is no sentient lizard familiar, though!) Since I am a big fan of the Jhereg books, this is by no means a bad thing! I'm certainly looking forward to reading more in this "Gentlemen Bastards" series, though I hope it continues the trend of making each volume complete in itself.
scott_lynch)Details: (c) Scott Lynch 2006; Pub 2007 Gollancz; ISBN 0-57507-9754
Verdict: The lies of Locke Lamora is a fun and original adventure set in the criminal underworld of Fantasyland.
Reasons for reading it: I've heard lots of people enthusing about Lynch recently.
How it came into my hands: Newcastle-under-Lyme library.
I can definitely see why The Lies of Locke Lamora is so popular; this is one of the most readable books I've come across recently. It would be easy to make it sound generic, but although its general outline isn't startlingly original, it does everything it does superlatively well. I think this is about as good as swords-and-sorcery gets.
The worldbuilding is really solid, you can really believe that Camorr is an actual city in an actual continent. It has an economy, a history, fashions, social strata, everything, yet the book is never didactic, the narrative never bludgeons you with how clever its ideas are, all the background fits smoothly into the story. It's really atmospheric, and I loved the incidental details of a vaguely pre-industrial civilization living in the ruins of an ancient ultra high-tech one. Magic works, but it's coherent and fits into the worldbuilding and seems to be driven by something other than the needs of the narrative.
The characterization is lovely; I have a soft spot for snarky protagonists, but Locke is plausible as well, he doesn't speak as if he were scripted. There aren't clear-cut good guys and bad guys, but multi-faceted people with complex motivations. The book is almost too careful to avoid stereotyping, but even though it's occasionally a little too earnest, for the most part it succeeds because every single minor character mentioned has a past and a personality and is more than just a generic innkeeper or thug or pawnbroker or whatever. The setting is one which is sexist but not so skewed that women are reduced to mere background scenery.
If I were being really picky I might say that the story is a little slow to get started, but only the tiniest bit, and within a few dozen pages it's highly dramatic and action-packed. The technique of cutting between the present, with Locke and his gang caught up in a world-threatening contest among the super-powerful, and his childhood and how he and his companions got to where they are, works surprisingly well. And the central contest is really well done, you can both believe that The Grey King is almost ultimately powerful, and that just the right alignment of circumstances makes it marginally possible for our heroes to thwart his plot. Major characters die, and the outcome has very real costs, partly because tLoLL is setting up for a sequel but mainly because the level of threat is very well balanced. I love the way that swordsmen can win extremely unequal fights, but not come out unscathed and require a lot of luck to do so.
The only minor quibble I have with tLoLL is that it has a rather positive portrayal of torture, but it's hardly based on real world morality anyway. Also, I was slightly annoyed by the way that the geography is only very, very thinly disguised from being European, right down to the fact that the inhabitans of "Camorr" have Italian-ish names and mafia-like mores. You could say that the book suffers a little from some of the minor irritations typical of American authored books set in pre-modern not-Europe, but that's a very small point.
It occurs to me that it would be quite hard to describe tLoLL so that my description wouldn't also apply to Brust's Jhereg series. (There is no sentient lizard familiar, though!) Since I am a big fan of the Jhereg books, this is by no means a bad thing! I'm certainly looking forward to reading more in this "Gentlemen Bastards" series, though I hope it continues the trend of making each volume complete in itself.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-22 05:51 pm (UTC)I don't agree with your impression that the bad guys are cartoonishly evil. To my reading, the Grey King was pretending to be cartoonishly evil in order to fool stupid people into being scared of him and brighter people into not taking him seriously. He had a personality and a past though. And likewise with the Lukas Fehrwecht bit, I particularly appreciated the fact that the nobles were not the typical stupid spoilt posh twats who deserved financial ruin just because of being rich and privileged. They were human too, and I felt sorry for them even when I was cheering on Lamora's scam, and this made me enjoy the book much more than I would the kind of scam story that you describe.
There are two things that the Vlad books definitely do better, and I can see you putting a lot of weight on those. They have a much better sense of the numinous, and the magic is emotionally rather than just intellectually satisfying. And secondly they are superlatively good at creating a highly complex and interconnected story.