Red Seas Under Red Skies - Scott Lynch

I feel like a real theme of my reading choices lately are those with film or television adaptations. As I finish the second book of Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series, I find out that the first was optioned by Warner Brothers all the way back in 2006. Whatever happened? Where's the promised adaptation? Same thing happened with Naomi Novik's Temeraire series. Peter Jackson picked up the rights nearly a decade ago now, and nothing's ever come of it. Stop playing with my heart, Hollywood. It's cruel to tease me this way.

Sometimes I just want to find some cool art to include to break up a wall of text.

Red Seas Under Red Skies picks up where The Lies of Locke Lamora left off, with Jean and Locke fleeing the city of Camorr (As always, forgive any errs in spelling, as I only know these names phonetically!). There's a lot of emotional fallout for the pair to deal with, but eventually they pick up their games again in Tal Verrar. Naturally, as is the case with the stories of Locke Lamora, everything falls to shit when someone decides to start messing with their lives. The Archon of Tal Verrar tricks the pair into drinking a poison that places them in his power, and they must do his bidding for him to give them the antidote to keep the poison at bay every eight weeks. Locke takes on the new identity of a rogue ship captain--I cannot find the spelling to save my life--and 'steals' one of the Archon's ships (with the Archon's blessing, obvs), with the goal of hazing Tal Verrar and forcing the people of the city to turn to the Archon for protection. But--surprise!--their plan falls to shit too. These books are like the definition of putting your characters up trees and throwing rocks at them.

Like the first book, I listened to this as an audiobook from Audible. Again, the narrator is great, but I find that Lynch's intricate timeline braiding limits this book's effectiveness as an audiobook: I got lost a lot. We jump around between various points in time--from Locke's depression after leaving Camorr, to a stint in a town centered around a brutal slave fighting game, to their current time in Tal Verrar and on the Sea of Brass. I suspect that had I been reading the book the delineations between times would be clearer. As much as I like the technique of plot braiding, this might be a caution against getting too complex.

Back to the concept of throwing rocks at your characters: Lynch gives poor Jean Tannen a scant few weeks of happiness in love before cruelly ripping it away when Ezri dies most dramatically. Now, the husband and I have a terrible habit of coming up with 'corrections' to plots that we think would make them better, and I'm going to indulge myself here. This part of the plot feels really hokey to me, in a "we end the book exactly where we started" kind of way. You know how (bad) sitcoms wrap up that week's storyline by the end of the show in a nicely contained box that doesn't effect any other episode's continuity? It's dissatisfying because it feels like the characters aren't really changing.

So I put this idea forth that, if someone had to die, why not Jean himself? I feel like there was a huge opportunity there for an interesting dynamic. Ezri was a really fascinating character--a daughter of nobility who ran off to become a pirate, a damn good fighter, and angry. I have a huge soft spot for angry women characters. Both Ezri and Locke deeply love Jean (yes, in different ways, doesn't change the depth) and, say, if Jean had made them both promise to watch out for the other, because he saw the depths of depression Locke went into when the rest of their brothers were killed, etc. we could have found this really fascinating dynamic of a pair continuing their game while simultaneously despising each other. Each would be the other's only link to Jean, and therefore a kind of bittersweet partner that they might cling to despite the pain and irritation. A mutual respect could grow of that. And, I'll admit, I would enjoy messing with anyone's automatic expectation that they should become romantically involved, because I could see both characters answering "What? Ew, no!" if the question were raised.

But that's not what happened, so eh. Kill your darlings, I say. Don't let your love for a character keep them around when it would be a better plot choice to dump them.

The other plot point I wondered about was Stragos' poison. I had this inkling early on that the poison was a red herring, but it never came to fruit. What if there was no poison at all? Locke makes his living on deceiving people with words and actions, wouldn't it be nice to see the same played on him? I kept waiting for the end reveal, especially after the alchemist was killed and no more antidotes were to be had, but we ended on this cliffhanger of "will Locke die?" Well, obviously we know he won't die, it's his series. So maybe that is the reveal and it'll happen in the next book, but it would have been a fun moment for a reader if it had actually been revealed.

I feel like I really could keep on talking about this book for ages, but I'll wrap it up with a note on Lynch's dialogue. I like swearing. I like swearing a lot. So I really enjoy reading a book where the swearing is natural and fits in context, and honestly, it makes Lynch's dialogue pretty funny and on point. As a whole I think he's pretty great at dialogue, with or without swearing, because the quips always make me laugh. On a whole, though, this book suffers from pacing. It felt like the longest audiobook of my life.

"I also do a brisk trade in putting knives to peoples throats and shouting at them."

Jean grinned down at her, and she handed him something in a small silk bag.
"What's this?"
"Lock of my hair," she said. "Meant to give it to you days ago, but we got busy with all the raiding. You know. Piracy. Hectic life."
"Thank you, love," he said.
"Now, if you find yourself in trouble wherever you go, you can hold up that little bag to whoever's bothering you, and you can say, 'You have no idea who you're fucking with. I'm under the protection of the lady who gave me this object of her favour.'"
"And that's supposed to make them stop?"
"Shit no, that's just to confuse them. Then you kill them while they're standing there looking at you funny."

Overall: 3.5 stars

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The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

I don't make any secret of the love affair I have with Audible. I know the literary world has some extremely valid concerns about Amazon as a company (which has thankfully been resolved in Hachette's favor) but it's so hard as a consumer to get past the sheer convenience of both Amazon ebooks and its subcompany Audible. I use my existing device! There's no cd's to get lost! I can sync between multiple devices! The user interface of the Audible app is super easy and intuitive! But most of all? I don't have to stop reading books just because I'm doing something extremely silly like driving or cleaning house. I mean, eff that.

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

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