The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch

We all have those things in our life that arise in us a strong positive reaction. Venice is one of those things for me. I am from the region of Italy surrounding Venice, and some of my earliest childhood memories are of my mother taking me and my brother to Venice for small excursion, where we would often do little more than putz about the alleys and canals without any kind of direction. I did my first year of university there, as well as had some summer jobs on the island. I to this day react pretty poorly when people speak ill of the city, particuarly as I find that with a proper guide the city still can be pretty wonderful.

I could speak at length about the problems of the modern city as well, but let’s save that.

I have read more books on the city and its history than I care to mention, and will watch and movie or show set there. So when I learned that there was a fantasy series set in a thinly veiled fantasy version of Venice, I eagerly gave the first book a shake.

The Lies of Locke Lamora follows the titular character through the standard series of fantasy drama where a character is thrown into a situation greater than themselves that have impact on their whole world, which in this case seems to be the city of Camorr. We are given a lot of background on the character and their world through flashback chapter that flesh out the relevant information of where and how a certain character has received a certain suddenly relevant skill.

By my assessment, the author did a pretty good job at describing a verisimilitude of Venice in his Camorr, even though the more I looked at his text the more I felt that it was rarely described all that physically. It could have been just the lazy machine at work. There are not many canals in this story, but I guess there is more to Venice than the canals. What did stick out to me was to what extent the fixture of the plot points relied on the kind of things that Venice had – guilds, merchants funding expeditions, an arsenal, a dictatorial figure supported by a noble class, and all the intrigue that occur when these things intersect. It also has a lot of swearing, prostitution, and assassins. These last three a friend found to be a bit jarring, but that is truly what Venice was like (as for all that cursing, it is still very much a Venetian thing). The author adds to this just enough magic to make it a proper fantasy and not just a strange historical fiction.

I think I have laid out my biases upfront. But I will happily keep reading this series. It is blessedly short, and I am ready for a new one.