The Lies of Locke Lamora

The Lies of Locke Lamora, the first book of the Gentleman Bastards series written by Scott Lynch, is a novel that mixes heist stories with the fantasy genre. With a well-developed narrative, the book only fails when it starts to treat the reader with the same condescension with which the protagonist tries to deceive his victims.

Locke Lamora is an orphan boy who, after being recruited by the Thiefmaker of the city of Camorr, starts to live with a gang of kids, committing small crimes to its master in exchange for food. His pro-activity and ambition, however, start to irritate the Thiefmaker, who decides to sell him to a priest. Lamora, therefore, rises in his career, going from a simple pickpocket to a position in the Church.

The protagonist is a skillful young man with rustic features, whose ironic smile makes him “look like a slender wall-gargoyle.” His personality is already outlined by the initial events, which display his creativity when it comes to crafting ingenious plans but also reveals a bit of carelessness regarding his own life, which can lead him to commit some reckless acts. As one of his friends describes him: “If he had a bloody gash across his throat and a physiker was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and die laughing.”

It is precisely these traits that form his tragic narrative arc: Lamora is a thief of ambition and intelligence, but he has the habit of neglecting the possible side effects of his extraordinary actions, eventually putting those he loves in dangerous situations.

The novel follows the preparations for one of Lamora’s greatest heists: stealing the fortune of a nobleman called Don Lorenzo Salvara. The protagonist’s plans, however, may be thwarted by the sudden appearance of a sinister individual who has been murdering the main thieves of Camorr: the mysterious Gray King.

The book is structured with flashbacks – called interludes – about Locke’s time growing up in the Church cutting the scenes about his plans against Dom Salvara and the Gray King. These flashbacks serve to shed new light on the most current events, which in turn are not told always in chronological order, so to allow for twists that work with the reader’s lack of information: we often don’t know whether what is being said is true or even if the people in the scene are really who they claim to be.

At the other end of the spectrum, Lynch also works with dramatic irony, giving more information to the reader than to the characters in certain scenes. This is used sometimes to create humor, as when Lamora alerts his victim about his intention and only the reader and Lamora knows of this (“We have a saying – that undeserved good fortune always conceals a snare.”), and sometimes to create suspense, with the reader knowing in advance that the protagonist is walking defenseless to a trap, for example.

The author also deserves recognition for his work with colors, especially red. Red is usually associated with the notion of danger and Lynch is rigorous in its use, inserting it at the beginning of scenes where something bad is about to happen, making the color an alert to the reader, increasing the tension whenever it appears in the narrative. Red appears, for example, as the color of a poison bag, and, in another scene, it is used to build the atmosphere of a confession that narrates violent acts: “Here Locke paused and fiddled with his little lamp, making the red glow waver on his face.” Finally, Lynch associates red with an important concept in the story, mixing the ideas of revenge and justice and painting them all with blood.

The author also makes great use of symbolism throughout the novel. The fight with a shark that Locke watches alongside Don Salvara, for instance, reflects his predatory relationship with his victim, and this meaning of the shark is revisited later, when the animal reappears as the same symbol, but in a more… literal manner.

However, the strength of The Lies of Locke Lamora lies – as is customary in heist narratives – in the twists and turns of the story. Lynch places several elements hidden in plain sight and surprises the reader not just by making them resurface in an unexpected manner, but also in a brutal one. The sudden changes of tone mark the biggest surprises: since Lamora is a very confident young man, he conveys a sense of security and invincibility at all times. When this security is broken, the shock is big.

As for the fantastical universe presented, the city of Camorr stands out for its evident Italian inspirations. It is a typical Venetian city, built with numerous canals and alleys with “more gangs than it has foul odors,” and marked by an immense social gap, with groups of orphans who have rob to survive sleeping in cemeteries, while nobles relax and amuse themselves in floating orchards. The Italian influence in the setting is also evident in the characters’ names (Don Salvara), in their obvious obsession with wine, and in the widespread presence of mafias.

The novel, however, falters in the manner in which it transmits this information to the reader. The beginning of the book, in particular, is filled with dialogues marred by tiresome loads of exposition, with characters often reminding their interlocutors of past events or the characteristics of Camorr. The first conversations between Locke and Don Salvara are particularly poor in this regard, being packed with long and boring info dumps, as the following dialogue exemplifies:

“There have been three invasions of Emberlain in the past two hundred and fifty years. Let’s be frank; the succession rites of the Kingdom of the Marrows always involve armies and blood before they involve blessings and banquets. When the Grafs quarrel, the Austershalin mountains are our only landward barrier, and the site of heavy fighting. This fighting inevitably spills down the eastern slopes of the mountains. Right through the vineyards of the House of bel Auster. How could it be different this time? Thousands of men and horses coming over the passes. Trampling the vineyards. Sacking everything in sight. It might even be worse, now that we have fire-oil. Our vineyards could be ashes half a year from now.”

Only two lines after this dialogue there is another one that is even larger and equally didactic. Worse still are the instants in which Lynch – in a clear lack of confidence in his readers – uses flashbacks to explain the context of situations that could very well have been inferred from the reactions and dialogues of the characters. The moment a “bondsmage” appears for the first time is the most egregious one: the flashback interrupts the main story just to explains what a bondsmage is, and it’s not even called an interlude. That is, the scene breaks not only the flow of the narrative but also its formal consistency. Besides that, some of the scenes about Locke’s upbringing and training are pretty useless: if the scene about how he worked as a farmer one day had been completely eliminated from the narrative, for example, no important information would have been lost.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is a great fantasy novel, containing a complex and well-developed story with a fascinating and tragic protagonist. It is impossible to forget, however, that it would have been even better if Lynch had shown a little more confidence in his reader and got rid of the exacerbated exposition.

June 07, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 09, 2016.