The Lies of Locke Lamora

It's taken me a while to get round to it, but I've finally read Scott Lynch's astonishingly accomplished debut novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora. Set in Camorr, a fantastical place clearly based on medieval Venice, it follows a group of assured con men as they find themselves caught up in a power struggle for control of the city's underworld.

Brought up and trained by Father Chains, a master thief and priest of the Crooked Warden, Locke and the rest of his gang, the Gentlemen Basterds, are consumate con artists and superb social chameleons. In shameless contravention of the Secret Peace, an agreement between the Duke and the crime lord Vencarlo Basarvi which effectively cedes control of some districts of Camorr in exchange for keeping the aristocracy safe from crime, Locke is playing out a long con against Don Lorenzo Salvara with the intention to relieve him of tens of thousands of crowns.

With the heist proceeding according to plan Locke pays a routine call on Capa Barsavi, who believes the Gentlemen Bastards to be a small gang of competent but low turnover burglars. The Capa is in a strange mood. Worried by the death of a number of his garristas as the hands of a crazed murderer called the Grey King, Barsavi make Locke an unexpected offer he simply can't refuse. Then, as if things weren't complicated enough, Locke is summoned by the Grey King and threatened with total exposure unless he plays along with the King's scheme; and having just seen Barsavi's chief torturer at work, Locke realises that this too is an offer he dare not turn down. From this point on the previously assured Gentlemen Bastards find themselves caught up in a frantic struggle for survival as the underworld erupts into war and chaos around them.

The Lies of Locke Lamora really is every bit as good as it's reputation suggests. The city of Camorr lives and breathes like a real place, mixing the familiar medieval elements of poverty, squalor, vast inequalities of wealth and circumstance, with fantastical towers and bridges of Elderglass — the product of powerful, vanished group of unknown predecessors — and alchemical lights and brandy and poisons. The Gentlemen Bastards make a likeable group, for all that their actions are distinctly amoral they, unlike the rest of Capa Barsavi's Right People, pray on the aristocracy rather than the poor and try to avoid killing people where they can. The book is also often very funny, not in a jarring and effortful way, but in one fits with a group of characters who are clever and sarcastic and who've been brought up to be witty and charming.

The writing itself is extremely polished and the narrative is structured in a way that mixes the heist plot and following struggle to survive with the earlier days of the Bastards under the tutelage of Father Chains. Lynch also makes use of the same mechanism to insert important bits of legend or information without interrupting the flow of the main narrative with uncomfortable and awkward exposition. He also, occasionally, plays with the timing of events, showing a scene from one perspective before jumping back to show the build-up from another point of view in order t completely reverse the meaning of what has just happened. As I said at the start, it's extraordinarily assured and controlled.

Required reading.

Maleficent

I'm surprised and slightly embarrassed to say I really enjoyed Maleficent. It was astonishingly pretty to look at, the story was undemanding mashup of various classic fairytales, the twists were foreshadowed heavily enough that there was never any real worry about how things would turn out, and Angelina Jolie upstaged everyone and everything with her enhanced cheekbones and cutting manners. Ideal, undemanding stuff for a lazy Sunday evening.