The Lies of Locke Lamora
I just finished The Lies of Locke Lamora, a fantasy novel about an Ocean's 11-type con man in a vaguely-Renaissance city. I liked it and will probably read the sequel (I am informed there are six planned, which I guess is how the fantasy novel biz goes these days), but I do have some spoily gripes and other comments.


Ok, so my major plot complaint about this book is the Bondsmage. Basically, I think the setting suffers from the D&D mage problem: magic spells of the kind even low-level mages can throw around would totally revolutionize a world, but the standard D&D setting just ignores this. Bondsmages are supposed to be rare in this setting, but they're common enough that almost everyone's heard of them and knows how much they can be hired for. Given that they can do invisibility, mind control, divination of location, and telepathy, shouldn't there be more defenses against them? Like, say, shouldn't the head of the secret police for the most powerful city in the country have something prepared in case she came across one? She clearly relies on anonymity for most of her defense, but I can't believe that's all she needs.

The book tries to deal with this by saying "they're too expensive for anyone to hire for long!" but this only works a little bit. First off, the city is clearly extremely rich: even if private citizens can't hire them, you'd expect the government could afford to have one on retainer. Second, the shocking revelation to the problem posed early on -- "How can the bad guy keep a Bondsmage on retainer for a month when they're hideously expensive?" -- turns out to be "Because he had a lot of money saved up." Not only does this imply things about the cost of a Bondsmage that makes it less sensible that, say, Meraggio's stock brokerage and Capo Barsavi can't afford to have one around (they're both scooping up from an entire city -- surely this matches one guy operating alone for twenty years*), it's also, you know, a lame answer. What would have been awesome is if the Gray King was conning the Bondsmage somehow, with fake coins or treasure, or some kind of blackmail. But no, it's just he worked really hard and got enough money.

*Though possibly it requires saving for twenty years to afford a Bondsmage for two months; the Gray King obviously didn't need him long-term. Also there seems to be some implication that some of the money taken from Barsavi's treasury will go to pay the Bondsmage, plus the money Locke's collected (but the Gray King couldn't have known about that in advance!).

I also find it a little implausible that Bondsmages take an oath to avenge the death of another, but not to avenge a fellow Bondsmage who has all their limbs chopped off. I guess this will be addressed in the sequel, The Loopholes of Locke Lamora.

Anyway, enough about implausibility. Let's talk choppiness.

I'm willing to forgive some dangling hooks for the sake of future sequel, but it seems kind of lame to keep saying "THE PROTAGONIST HAS A BIG CRUSH ON THIS GIRL" and not show us any scenes with the girl or give us any information about why she left or what happened between them.

More generally, there are a lot of little areas where it felt like the author left out scenes we should have seen. There's a bit where Locke goes away to become a farming priest for a while -- wouldn't this have been a rewarding scene, as the ultimate city boy has to get his hands dirty and talk to rural people? There's the fact that Father Chains dies somewhere along the line. I expect the author wanted to leave this for the sequel also, but I don't think that was a particularly good decision: as it is, the transition between the old scenes and the new scenes come off to me as jumpy because we don't have any idea about what went on in the years that separate them (but we can't just assume that it was 'the usual' because we know lots of significant stuff happened). We get just enough of the relationship with Nazca to guess at how it goes, but I would have liked to see a fair bit more.

Then there are some scenes that don't really feel necessary. The bit where Jean fights the Berangias twins, for instance. This is a totally cool scene, and a nice conclusion to the bit where Jean learns to fight. But if you look back on it, what does it accomplish? In fact, what use are the Berangias in the novel at all, besides looking cool? Ok, yes, they're Barsavi's bodyguards and provide for a surprise twist as they betray him, but there's plenty of betrayal going on in that scene already. I don't think they threaten Locke or any of the Gentlemen Bastards at any point in the novel, or otherwise interfere with any schemes, except for showing up at the end to get beaten by Jean. And why? To fight him at a dramatic point in the novel where he's desperately trying to stop some scheme of the Gray King that he's just exposed? No, just to show up like a random encounter when he was poking around, before he's learned anything of interest to the reader, and they die without giving away anything more. (We know in retrospect that he'd stumbled on the place where they built the glass pyramids full of Wraithstone, but that's not clear or useful to know at the time.)

I wish we'd spent a little less time on the scam at the beginning, too. It takes about 200 pages for the Gray King to show up in person, and 300 for the Spider (the head of the secret police). I agree it's important to play out the scam since it shows what kind of guys Locke and the crew are, and it sets up stuff for later, but despite my original comments, this actually isn't an Ocean's-11 caper story, it's a revenge story, and the important stuff is about the interactions of Locke and the Gray King, and we ought to get to them early. And because the Spider's so important to the end plot we ought to see her earlier too, even if it's not immediately clear who she is or what her role in the plot is.

With the pagecount we saved there, I wouldn't have minded a little more attention to the ending. It was about 80 pages to the end when I started wondering how the author was going to wrap it all up in time, and the answer turns out to be "by rushing through it". They capture the Bondsmage 54 pages before the end, so up until then we don't have any real idea what the bad guy's plot is, and the interrogation, return to the party, convincing the good guys what's up, disposal of the Wraithstone, and disposal of the Gray King, all get squeezed into that little space. I'm not against that kind of thing -- I mean, Howard does entire Conan stories in less space -- but it feels unbalanced, given the relatively slow pace of the rest of the novel.

The final thing I wanted to gripe about is the linguistics. I find the different kinds of names really bothersome -- how can we have "Jean", "Locke", and "Barsavi" in the same setting? (I mean, we do in the real world, but you don't get this kind of mixing with renaissance levels of transportation, surely.) It's worse with place names -- would there really be a city with both "Via Camorrazza" and "Beggar's Barrow"?

Ok, so if you're still reading, you are probably wondering why I kept reading. Here is a short list of awesome things in the novel: bull-fighting on the river with sharks, alchemy mixed with gardening to give all sorts of crazy plants, floating markets, floating trees, con artists, this weird Elderglass thing, this garden made out of Elderglass, nobles who live up in towers and have to be winched up, a bunch of short anecdotes to show what a nasty bunch the city people are, Renaissance bankers, cut-throat gang wars, interesting orders of priests, gritty combat with fancy weapons, revenge, and complicated spy networks. This is basically a list of all the sorts of things I like in a story. I think this is also the problem I have with the Bondsmage -- he doesn't just force the plot, he does it in a way that negates the coolness of almost all the things I just listed. But the bits without him are pretty excellent.


In summary, it feels a little like the novel ended up too long and had a hundred pages cut, which is good in theory, but I'm not sure they were the right hundred pages to cut.

Incidentally, for people curious if they'd like this book, the author apparently has an old blog which has some sample chapters that I don't think have any real spoilers (I'd link directly to the entries, but the links all appear to be busted -- just skim down, and you'll see a couple).