The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1) in The Sword and Laser

Sep 04, 2012 John Wiswell rated it it was amazing

The most entertaining debut novel I've read since Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, and every bit as enviably crafted. It’s offensive that someone start his career this good, and worse than Brooks, since Lynch has already written another Gentlemen Bastard novel, intends at least five more, and shows every sign of continuing producing amazing novels afterward. At least Max Brooks only wrote one great novel and then left us alone to recover our self-esteem.

In The Lies o The most entertaining debut novel I've read since Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, and every bit as enviably crafted. It’s offensive that someone start his career this good, and worse than Brooks, since Lynch has already written another Gentlemen Bastard novel, intends at least five more, and shows every sign of continuing producing amazing novels afterward. At least Max Brooks only wrote one great novel and then left us alone to recover our self-esteem.

In The Lies of Locke Lamora we follow the eponymous Locke, an orphan who no one really wants since he has the habit of burning down buildings and robbing the militia. The novel bounces between his childhood, being raised by a sinister priest into a veritable religion of crime, and his adulthood, where his schemes run rampant across a corrupt world. The more people he bamboozles, crosses or allies with, the more we learn about how insanely corrupt and dangerous his world is. The prostitutes run their own business because they kept killing their pimps; the Bond Mages run whatever they want because they dismembered the empire that tried to oppress them; there’s even a strongman who keeps a pool of sharks around for sport or boredom. It’s a world where an overambitious thief like Locke is bound to get in over his head. Wink, wink.

Lynch explores the increasingly popular Renaissance Fantasy world, rather than the established Medieval Fantasy. What sets his apart from even other RenFantasies is voice, style and cynicism; this world may be entirely populated by liars and backstabbers. There are funny characters, and characters who do good things in addition to bad (my favorite and the best-hearted of the cast also sports one of the highest body counts), and characters whose motivations we can even sympathize with, but every last one of them is a bastard. Our heroes even call themselves The Gentlemen Bastards. When Locke (a Bastard to the end) allows himself to be beaten into a pulp in order to delay a villain's escape, he seems admirable, and we may even forget that he's doing it so the villain can in turn be beaten into another pulp so that Locke's gang can reign supreme on this turf. By executing this with whit and whimsy rather than grit, Lynch pulls off an amazing trick: these people can deceive, rob and beat up each other, and it's always guiltlessly entertaining.

Hundreds of pages in, I was still discovering new reasons to admire Lynch’s craft. As a sucker for humor or unusual world-building, I was surprised that my strongest reaction was just to a dialogue scene. You come to expect this world will always solve its problems in a horrible way, and after two orphans get into a brawl over pride and parentage, I imagined they’d be arch-enemies for life. Another Harry-and-Draco. But instead, the first was talked into seeing the error of his ways and brought a pathetic peace offering, and the second was so confused in his own internal struggle that he couldn’t keep up his grudge. The result? They talked out their problem and bonded. I think just about any editor or workshop I’ve perused would yell at you for giving up such a promising conflict, and yet the novel does, for something that’s touching and incredibly unexpected in Fantasy’s more jaded shelves.

I can't let this review pass without discussing flashbacks. I hate flashbacks. For every Memento, we get a hundred half-baked narratives that lack the fundamental craft or creativity to produce a good story, and so writers mix up linear time to fabricate intrigue, and even more often, to hide obvious information. The flashback is almost always the sign of a story you couldn’t do well if told straight.

The Lies of Locke Lamora has dozens of flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood. Later, we get flashbacks to the youths of other characters, or even to world history. These Interludes usually come after cliffhanger chapters or interrupt dramatic resolutions, the stuff that drives even devoted fans up the wall, and I didn’t mind them.

Why? Because every flashback was its own story, well-crafted, with something of its own to deliver, completely entertaining in its own right. It’s like all those digressive chapters in Moby-Dick that fill you in on what you need to know, but independently entertaining and with narrative sensibility. Some of the most creative things in the entire novel are throwaway anecdotes about the young thieves scheming or feuding, which never come up again in the future, even in significant echoes. You’re not really learning about Locke, beyond the basic facts of his upbringing and connections. These are just more clever stories in a greater fiction, contributing as much to theme as world-building.

Those side-chapters do eventually signal the novel’s weakness, as near the end our surviving Gentlemen Bastards have to decipher much and plot up their own counter-scheme. During this period the novel flounders for point, where previously it ran along with whatever Locke’s ambitions take us to. As he loses agency, the interjections of flashbacks draw attention to the weakening narrative by way of how little tension they’re interrupting. It’s almost a magic trick when the cast pulls itself together and starts driving through conflicts, and the Interludes suddenly shrink to a few pages a-piece, as though to get out of the way.

That dénouement stretch counterpoints all the novel’s attractions. All along it’s really been worth reading for the characters, for the shorter stories within the big political arc, for the humor and the individual capers. You crave the novel to deliver some impossible revelation at the end, that everything was someone’s grand design. Even in trying to deliver that, though, we descend into yards of exposition instead of progression. Like most good crime novels and movies, it’s at least entertaining when it explains itself, and its most entertaining when it explains almost anything else. Tell me about forgotten gods who want me to steal, or about disposing of bodies in horse urine, or best of all, show me why these scoundrels love each other – and you’ve got a staggering work of Fantasy. ...more

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Dec 29, 2013 Chessa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: series, sf_fantasy, 5star_2014

Wow, what a fun ride! You can't help but fall in love with every single one of the Gentleman Bastards, and with Locke Lamora in particular. Part SF and part Fantasy (the setting is both strangely Science Fiction, with elements of a mysterious former race of beings, the Elders, that left behind many structures and "elderglass", but also traditional fantasy as well, with it's highly stratified class society of dukes and nobles on down to peasants and beggars). But at its heart this is a mystery st ...more

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Apr 04, 2012 Joanna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

4.5 stars. This took a while to get into, to the point where I got the Audible version but read the last 50% or so. This is basically a heist novel in a fantasy Venice-like world. The story alternates with stories of Locke and how he grows up to be a great thief, and the present day shenanigans he gets into. Some parts were laugh out loud funny and others were really heart-wrenching. Each of the characters were really well and fully developed and I really grew to care about them. There were a co ...more

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Apr 26, 2012 Michael Underwood rated it it was amazing

Shelves: speculative-fiction, my-friends-books, influences

I read this book very close to publication, thanks to connections at Random House. Reading it for the first time was a revelation. The plotting is amazingly sophisticated, the writing immaculate, and the whole story contains an infectious sense of fun that lingers years after reading.

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