bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2023-05-15 10:44 am
bloodygranuaile) wrote2023-05-15 10:44 am
Of false-facing and fucking up
My girlfriend and I are playing Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (or, more specifically, we’re playing the Alexandrian remix of WDH for Pathfinder 2e with bits of Blades In the Dark thrown in, or something; I’m not the GM), and in preparation for such, I had to learn about spellcasting in Pathfinder and my girlfriend had to read Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. I realized it’d been ages since I read it and should probably also get a refresher, if only for shenanigans ideas I might be able to steal, so my spare time in the past few weeks has been largely split between heisting dragons and rereading The Lies of Locke Lamora.
The Lies of Locke Lamora is 700 pages long, a fact which escaped me when I read it for the first time in ebook but which was much harder to ignore in hard copy, and it doesn’t have a dull moment in all 700. It’s one of those violent, nasty, sweary, boozy books that honestly feels a little more tired these days than it did 10 years ago given the post-Game of Thrones hangover many of us fantasy fans are still suffering, but as far as “sweary books that make sure you can smell the beer farts off the page” go, nothing else in it is tired. This is a fast-paced series of increasingly multilayered capers, cons, and conspiracies that isn’t afraid to put its extremely-domain-specific-competence-porn antihero through a series of undignified wringers, from being kicked in the balls to being nearly drowned in a barrel of horse piss. (At one point he is decked in the face “courtesy of Locke Lamora” while disguised as somebody else.)
Locke is a really fun protagonist; he’s not really a bad guy although obviously he’s not a good one either–an orphaned child with a nearly preternatural gift for thieving raised among criminals in a city where what counts as law-abiding isn’t much better, it’s easy to take Locke’s side as he lies his face off to everybody except his little found family gang in the Elderglass basement of the Temple of Perelandro. This little gang, called the Gentlemen Bastards, exists basically to violate the Secret Peace, a nasty little pact between the nobility and organized crime in which the city’s criminals are allowed to crime as much as they want only on the working and middle classes, and essentially avoid prosecution as long as they leave alone the nobility and the police force–you know, the group with all the fucking money in the first place, and the gang of thugs that’s supposed to be keeping the law. The Gentlemen Bastards take great pride in stealing off the people they’re not supposed to steal from, not out of any altruistic Robin Hood-esque reasons but just because the nobility is where the wealth is, and it’s the greater challenge than sneaking into the second stories of small shopkeepers’ houses. Anyway, the ruling class is a gang and the cops are also a gang.
Locke and his best buddy Jean cause heaps of trouble and get in even more, crossing paths with a variety of upsettingly powerful people who do wind up really exposing the degree to which, despite their excellent con artist skills, the Gentleman Bastards really are just little guys. Can they con their way out of having every powerful faction in Camorr deeply enraged at them? Even if so, at what cost? The answers make exciting reading but admittedly do also make me worried for the fate of my own little rogue thief because I’m not nearly as smart as Scott Lynch and I’ve got to make decisions more or less in real-time, which is hard. (I saw Scott Lynch do a panel about that once and boy is he correct.)
Have I mentioned I love heist fantasy? If not, please know that I love heist fantasy, and this is very good heist fantasy.
The Lies of Locke Lamora is 700 pages long, a fact which escaped me when I read it for the first time in ebook but which was much harder to ignore in hard copy, and it doesn’t have a dull moment in all 700. It’s one of those violent, nasty, sweary, boozy books that honestly feels a little more tired these days than it did 10 years ago given the post-Game of Thrones hangover many of us fantasy fans are still suffering, but as far as “sweary books that make sure you can smell the beer farts off the page” go, nothing else in it is tired. This is a fast-paced series of increasingly multilayered capers, cons, and conspiracies that isn’t afraid to put its extremely-domain-specific-competence-porn antihero through a series of undignified wringers, from being kicked in the balls to being nearly drowned in a barrel of horse piss. (At one point he is decked in the face “courtesy of Locke Lamora” while disguised as somebody else.)
Locke is a really fun protagonist; he’s not really a bad guy although obviously he’s not a good one either–an orphaned child with a nearly preternatural gift for thieving raised among criminals in a city where what counts as law-abiding isn’t much better, it’s easy to take Locke’s side as he lies his face off to everybody except his little found family gang in the Elderglass basement of the Temple of Perelandro. This little gang, called the Gentlemen Bastards, exists basically to violate the Secret Peace, a nasty little pact between the nobility and organized crime in which the city’s criminals are allowed to crime as much as they want only on the working and middle classes, and essentially avoid prosecution as long as they leave alone the nobility and the police force–you know, the group with all the fucking money in the first place, and the gang of thugs that’s supposed to be keeping the law. The Gentlemen Bastards take great pride in stealing off the people they’re not supposed to steal from, not out of any altruistic Robin Hood-esque reasons but just because the nobility is where the wealth is, and it’s the greater challenge than sneaking into the second stories of small shopkeepers’ houses. Anyway, the ruling class is a gang and the cops are also a gang.
Locke and his best buddy Jean cause heaps of trouble and get in even more, crossing paths with a variety of upsettingly powerful people who do wind up really exposing the degree to which, despite their excellent con artist skills, the Gentleman Bastards really are just little guys. Can they con their way out of having every powerful faction in Camorr deeply enraged at them? Even if so, at what cost? The answers make exciting reading but admittedly do also make me worried for the fate of my own little rogue thief because I’m not nearly as smart as Scott Lynch and I’ve got to make decisions more or less in real-time, which is hard. (I saw Scott Lynch do a panel about that once and boy is he correct.)
Have I mentioned I love heist fantasy? If not, please know that I love heist fantasy, and this is very good heist fantasy.