The Lies of Locke Lamora

The Lies of Locke Lamora

  - Scott Lynch
 

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had been interested in this book due to several enthusiastic recommendations from my (online) reading group, and a very high rating on Goodreads. Unfortunately, my experience didn't match that of the majority of readers, and I would rate it somewhere between 2.5 to 3.

For one, it had a very slow start. It was almost 30% before it started coming together, and I had seriously considered giving up. However, I persisted, and it was about halfway through that I finally got interested enough. I also felt it was too long, with repetitive descriptions (a mention of 'elderglass' and 'alchemical' in every paragraph had me screaming inside).

The narrative altered between past and present, which is fine. The way the background of key characters was built up was quite interesting. However, the style of presentation - where an incident is related, and the events leading up to it are described afterwards - in both the timelines, made it rather confusing.

I also did not like the setting - a state full of corruption, crime, poverty and cruelty, with no positive to look to anywhere. The profanity was perhaps integral to the setting, but I felt it was a little too much. The violence, both explicit and implicit, was definitely extreme.

On the credit side - the elaborate schemes and impersonations of Locke Lamora were entertaining and the final buildup was wonderful (which I guess is the point of the book), though I didn't understand the reason for his duplicity in revealing his intention to his victim, unless it was for his own amusement. There is a smattering of witty and amusing dialogues throughout the book. Most important, all the threads in this book are wound up at the end, so you are not compelled to read the sequence to find out how the things turned out.

The core and the theme of the story is great, so I think it would have been an amazing book if the boring and repetitive descriptions were pruned off and it was reduced to about 60-70% of length.