So I listened to The Lies of Locke Lamora as an audiobook, narrated by Michael Page. It's truly a different experience listening to a book rather than reading it, especially when you've got a great narrator. Each character's voice is made distinct in Page's mouth, and I don't know how he picked some of the accents used, but I really enjoyed the variety. There's a fine line between a good accent and a supremely obnoxious one, but Page stays just this side of it and keeps it entertaining. His Father Chains is especially entertaining.
Though that leads me into one downside of audiobooks: I never know how names are spelled. I had to look that one up. I run into this with Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series as well: how was I to know if Vorkosigan's name was Aral or Errol? It's not so bad in The Lies of Locke Lamora though, because everything is fairly phonetic.
Summary:
Locke Lamora is an orphan of the city of Camorr, who is especially smart and especially gifted at lying. This earns him a place in the Gentleman Bastards, a group of children lead and taught by Father Chains, who are essentially world-class scam artists. They are cloaked three times: to the city at large they are priests of the order of Perelandro; to Capa Barsavi they are his sworn band of simple thieves that pay him fealty; but underneath all that they are a group of liars who prey on the wealth of the nobility. All that changes when the Grey King, a mysterious figure terrorizing Barsavi and his underlings, uses Locke to enact a long-ranging plan of revenge against Barsavi.
As a reader:
One of the first things that I really realized about Lynch's worldbuilding here is how gender-equal everything is. Sure, laugh if you want, but fantasy as a genre is chock-full of a wide range of dude-types and a narrow range of woman-types, or sometimes characters who are only remarkable because they do something particularly deadly/strong/clever as a ~woman~. Lynch bypasses all that by literally making it a nonissue. Some of the thieves are boys. Some are girls. There's no real distinction. The mysterious organization that oversees all of Camorr and is lead by the terrifyingly clever Spider? Yeah, woman. Old woman, at that. It's not necessarily an important distinction to make, but I just have to say that I appreciate the general neutrality on gender here. (Note to self: write a story where the gender of each character is determined by coin flip.)
There were parts that didn't really feel satisfying to me, however. I don't feel as if I have a very good mental picture of this world. We touch on a few different nationalities but other than descriptions of clothing I don't really know the differences between them. I'm not even sure what most of the characters look like, aside from Jean is large and Locke is small. While some of the settings are downright cool--elderglass rose garden, where each petal and leaf is razor sharp and drinks up any blood they spill--I don't have a very good picture of the city. Part of that may be due to the audiobook rather than the written word, I'll admit. It can be really easy to gloss over details when you're hearing them, and I'm never like, just listening to it without doing anything else. So your mileage may vary.
As a writer:
I found the structure of this story to be particularly interesting. We start in Locke's childhood, which is downright cliche, and something that generally makes me roll my eyes. But we diverge after that into the 'present' time, where Locke is setting up a scam as Lucas Fehrwright, and intersperse flashback chapters of Father Chains teaching the boys their craft. I think this is a nice way to give the reader a backstory without boring them to tears, by putting it in tiny digestible bites. Plus it's a way to work Chains into the story, who really is a damn fascinating character. Given that he's dead in the present time, I wouldn't get to see any of him without these jumps back in time.
Lynch writes fantastic dialogue, as well. It's probably enhanced by the skills of Page as a reader, but so many of the lines made me laugh out loud for their sheer snappy wit.
“Some day, Locke Lamora,” he said, “some day, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“I cut off his fingers to get him to talk, and when he'd confessed everything I wanted to hear, I had his fucking tongue cut out, and the stump cauterized."
Everyone in the room stared at him.
"I called him an asshole, too," said Locke. "He didn't like that.”
But what I didn't like? The so-called mystery surrounding Sabetha. Every time she's mentioned I know the reader is supposed to go, "Oh, Sabetha! They used to be lovers! Locke still hurts! I want to know what happened!" But in order to care about a character we have to have something to go off of. I know nothing about Sabetha, and so there's no reason for me to care. I'm sure Lynch is saving it for a following book, but jesus man, that dangling carrot isn't tempting, it's just obnoxious. Get it out of my way so I can see better.
Overall: 4 stars
Amazon: The Lies of Locke Lamora
More reviews: The Lies of Locke Lamora on Librarything (Average 4.24 stars)
The Lies of Locke Lamora on Goodreads (Average 4.28 stars)
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