Yuffie's Book Reviews

The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastards #1) - by Scott Lynch

The Lies of Locke Lamora is the adult version of Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord. On steroids, after drinking a Monster--no make that 4 Monsters. And a cup of coffee.

THE PLOT

What's astonishing about this story is how the main plot doesn't even come into play until halfway into the book, and yet I didn't once think of putting it down during the set-up in the first half.

So the book begins from the pov of a minor character who will never show up again. Normally these openings suck because they give you a false sense of who the protagonist is and what the story is actually about. But that wasn't the case with TLoLL! Never did I lose sight of that fact that even though this first chapter was told by the Thiefmaker, this is Locke's story.

We start from the pov of the Thiefmaker, who meets with a "blind" priest, trying to sell him a young boy. The dialogue in this scene creates beautiful buildup of how conniving, threatening, and epic Locke is even though he's like 5 years old.

The Thiefmaker is this old dude who goes around collecting orphans and training them to be the city's greatest thieves. What's most fascinating about this set-up is not that they all live in a cemetary (though that's pretty awesome!) but that there are HUNDREDS of these little thieves-in-making running around. They have an elaborate hierarchy of power, a system to keep everyone doing their job and complying with the Thiefmaker's demands.

And here we have little Locke Lamora throwing a huge wrench into the system. Even though we only spend a chapter (or two? I can't remember) with the Thiefmaker, we start to see just how bad Locke is if he can make the freaking Theifmaker sweat.

Locke is a genius in thievery and conning, too much so to stay with the Thiefmaker. Because of him, a dozen of his fellow thieves are killed. Now, Locke should die for his actions too, but he's just too valuable of an asset to waste, so the Thiefmaker makes a latch-ditch effort to sell him to another thieving gang and get this troublesome boy off his hands. He succeeds in selling Locke to Chains, a thief pretening to be a blind priest who permanently chained himself to the temple (but not really; it's just an act) in a display of his faith.

And here the story ... still hasn't begun. But that's okay because this book is so awesome anyway. I'll explain in a bit.

The story is told in a non-linear fashion, so during the first 1/3 of the book, it goes back and forth between Locke's childhood under Chains's wing and when he's an adult and Chains has passed away, giving Locke control of the gang.

This non-linear storytellings works to a great effect. Locke is pulling off some heist as an adult, and then it shifts back to the past to give us the backstory of how Chains trained him, how he came to meet the members of his gang and create a strong bond with them. Normally, it would seem like all the past scenes are irrelevant--it's just backstory and we don't need to see it to understand the main plot. That's kind of true.

BUT

Everything is so well written telling witty, hilarious, and ingenious stories of Locke's cons as a child. I was too fascinated with the sheer detail put into the worldbuilding and set-up to care that it wasn't pushing forward the main plot. Even though Lynch broke a fundamental rule about infodumping and cutting out irrelevant scenes, he did it so well that I didn't care and found it thoroughly enjoying anyway. More on his infodumping/worldbuilding later.

Back to the non-linear storytelling. There was one scene that really stuck in my mind becuase of how well he utilized a non-linear device.

**SPOILERS**

Locke is trying to con these rich people out of all their money, and everything's going great until we get an omniscient scene showing a shady guy step out of the shadows and REVEAL LOCKE'S PLOT to them! I'm like: OH NO!