Red Seas Under Red Skies

Red Seas Under Red Skies, the second volume of the Gentleman Bastards series, continues to develop its two main characters, Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen, shedding new light on their troubled friendship. But the narrative, unfortunately, falters when it shifts to piracy, suddenly making everything come to a halt.

The novel follows the preparations for the next major heist of our pair of swindlers: they plan to rob from Requin, the biggest mobster in the city of Tal Verrar, who runs a casino with an iron fist. Some more sinister parties in the city have other plans for the two, however, making them depart on a long sea voyage and engage with pirates.

The sentence that opens the book (“Locke Lamora stood on the pier in Tal Verrar with the hot wind of a burning ship at his back and the cold bite of a loaded crossbow’s bolt at his neck”) is great in encompassing the main elements of the story: it situates the protagonist in the main setting, foreshadows the piracy theme with the image of the ship on fire, and, with the crossbow, alerts of the reader of the danger Locke will be in. A few pages later, Locke’s own body is compared to parts of a vessel (“His ribs stood out beneath his pale skin like the hull timbers of an unfinished ship“), making the previous image of the fire even more ominous. To make matters worse for the thief, the novel also begins with Jean’s possible betrayal, marking a terrible blow to him, and then goes back in time to explain how things ended up like that.

The book’s main focus is the relationship between Lamora and Tannen, showing their various disagreements, but also the strength of their bond. At the beginning, for example, when the protagonist is embittered by the events of the previous novel, Jean goes to great lengths to revitalize his friend and make him regain his drive. And Locke himself often exposes to Jean how vital their relationship is to him: “Gods help me, I will never be better off without you,” he confesses to his dear friend.

Their friendship is full of paradoxical elements. If, on the one hand, it keeps being exploited as a weakness by their enemies (“If either of you causes any trouble, I’m instructed to punish the other one”, someone threats them at a certain point), on the other, it manages to keep them from sinking under the seas of brutality they have to navigate through. If it provides a dose pathos due to the promise of betrayal, it also serves as comic relief with their inventive insults: “You might still be a lying, cheating, low-down, greedy, grasping, conniving, pocket-picking son of a bitch.”

As the book’s title reveals, Lynch continues to work with the symbolical meaning of the color red as a sign of danger: “Red seas under red Skies” marks not one but two sources of peril, reflecting the structure of the story. If Requin is the first, the unscrupulous politician that kidnaps them represents the second obstacle they must overcome. The city-state of Tal Verrar is also connected with this symbolism, being called The Rose of the Gods, while the wasps that the two find in a certain scene have a bright red coloration that warns about their danger, and the very ship that transports them to Tal Verrar, and in which Locke and Jean eventually depart for the high seas, completes the warning, being called The Red Messenger.

Locke is still the thief with the heart of gold that he was in the previous novel. Although he’s always robbing people and planning heists, he’s also kind and has a keen sense of justice. The narrative, however, is heavy-handed when developing these elements, inserting, for example, an absurd scene that seems taken from The Purge series of movies. It goes like this: Locke discovers a place where a bunch of nobles and rich merchants play a board game, similar to chess, but with human beings as pieces. These people taken from the streets to be humiliated and tortured both physically and psychologically whenever they are sacrificed in the game: “At the Amusement War they can do exactly what they want to do to the poor folk and the simple folk. Things forbidden elsewhere. All you’re seeing is what they look like when they stop pretending they give a damn about anything.”

And it doesn’t stop there. To make the political allegory even more pronounced, violence becomes a commodity, with auctions happening among the rich to decide who will have the right to choose the appropriate punishment for those sacrificed pieces – auctions in which children participate, stimulated by their parents dressed in shades of red and gold. There is even a character who tries to justify all this to Locke, using a twisted notion of religion and meritocracy, affirming that those people being humiliated are there by their own fault: “That’s life, under the gods, by the will of the gods. Perhaps if they’d prayed harder, or saved more, or been less thoughtless with what they had, they wouldn’t need to come crawling here for Saljesca’s charity. Seems only fair that she should require most of them to earn it.”

Locke, despite being clever and intelligent, reveals in this scene an alarming naiveté, being surprised by the obvious fact that the people who come to the game do so not to “play”, but to revel in the torture: “Gods, Locke realized, barely any of them are here for the game at all. They’ve only come to see the defaults.” To make matters worse, the whole scene is eventually forgotten, despite the protagonist’s many promises of retribution. After all, for Locke to steal is not a simple activity, but a religion, with commandments like protecting other thieves and making the rich remember that they are not untouchable. For him, stealing from the powerful is a matter of divine justice. Attacking the húbris of the rich is one of the things that give him pleasure, but the whole The Purge game is forgotten, never being mentioned again.

Jean is not much different from Locke, sharing the same political goals and attitudes. He only differs from his friend by being more pragmatic, while Lamora is more emotional, which gives a touch of irony to his eventual reasons to leave Lamora.

The villains, meanwhile, have no hidden layers, being exactly what they appear to be. Requin, for instance, is marked by his brutality, as proven by his revenge story, while Stragos, the politician who abducts the pair, has his personality reflected in his private garden, which impresses his visitors with a bit of spectacle, which is being carefully produced by servants hidden in the background: he makes a show of barking instead of biting. “A clockwork garden for my clockwork river. There’s not a real plant in here. It’s wood and clay and wire and silk; paint and dye and alchemy. All of it engineered to my design; it took the artificers and their assistants six years to construct it all,” he explains to the duo.

It’s Stragos who sends Locke and Jean to the high seas to become pirates, marking the point in the narrative where things start to become too problematic. The event basically occurs too late in the story to work. Until this point, the main plotlines were the heist on Requin and their attempts to survive Stragos. And these stories were just getting to their climax when they must be suddenly put on hold because the main characters are sent elsewhere.

This also means that the many side characters that are presented after this point have few pages to be developed: only the pirate captain and her first mate gain any time to shine, with the rest of the crew barely being mentioned, which reduces the impact of some betrayals and twists regarding them. The naval battle that serves as the climax of this whole plotline, for example, has a character with very few remarking features and almost no personality as the main antagonist, which makes the whole event feel random and pointless.

Finally, there’s the side-effect of turning Locke and Jean into passive characters that only react to other people’s plans. They never meant to be at sea and don’t know the first thing about sailing a boat, which greatly reduces their proactivity. This reflects their powerlessness in the face of the events, but also misses the point about what made they work in the first place:  these are great characters precisely when they are in control of the situation, outwitting their opponents. But, for the most part of this book, they remain simple spectators, trying to understand what is happening around them.

Another problem lies in the choice of an omniscient narrator that makes everything about the characters and the events explicit, remarking when Locke is being truly honest, explaining that a certain smile was really genuine, or revealing that Locke and Jean didn’t have a specific goal when they performed certain actions, which basically removes all the ambiguity from the characters and the situations. In a story packed with betrayals, traps, and scams, ambiguity would have been an efficient device to build tension and prepare the ground for some plot twists. Here, however, these twists need to be prepared largely by omission: the things the narrator chooses not to tell are the ones that hold the key to understanding the characters’ true plans. Therefore, it’s a choice that puts the reader in a less engaging position as there’s not much to work with.

The “pirate side” of the story also suffers from an excessive amount of nautical information, especially when Locke and Jean need to learn about them. The explanations are not just didactic but also constant during the middle part of the book, just when the narrative would have benefited from a more accelerated pace. Instead, passages like this become common: “The nose of your boat is called the bow, the ass is called the stern. Ain’t no right and left at sea. Right is starboard, left is larboard. Say right or left and you’re liable to get whipped. And remember, when you’re directing someone else, it’s the ship’s starboard and larboard you’re talking about, not your own.” However, the subversion of some nautical superstitions is interesting, such as when it is said that not having a woman on board brings bad luck, as they tend to make very competent officers.

Finally, the book continues to use the same structure as the first one: something very surprising happens, there is a flashback to explain how that was possible, and then it goes back to the actual event. It’s a structure that works best on film, though, since the editing can make the comings and goings more interesting than a narrative in prose.

Red Seas under Red Skies is an inferior sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora. It may have a lot of twists and turns and a compelling relationship at the center of its narrative, but its structure is too problematic to let all of its elements shine.

June 13, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 08, 2018.