K-SCORE: 47
Author: Scott Lynch
Spoiler Level: Major
I’m imagining this scenario. For the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, a story about a thieving band that loses their stash and many of their members and transitions to a revenge tale, author Scott Lynch sat down to write and whimsically decided: pirates. His confidants, family, friends, first readers, agents, publishers, etc. said, “Hey Scott, I think you should have Locke and Jean build a new band of thieves, maybe start up some new heists, bring back a few of the great characters that actually managed to survive the first story.” He replied, “pirates.” They reasoned, “Well, neither you nor your protagonist know anything about pirates and so it doesn’t fit very well with what you’ve established, with Locke and Jean’s skillset.” He replied, “pirates.” So they persisted by saying, “Well, how about you set a thief story on the high seas, connect the heists with the ships and the tiny islands you were hoping to add.” Finally he said, “Fuck you. Pirates!” And so pirates, we have.
“His alternate personas are no longer the unique strength that defines his being but rather a simple parlor trick like his sleight of hand card games.”
Red Seas Under Red Skies is a worse novel than its predecessor by a good margin, which is concerning because I thought the second half of The Lies of Locke Lamora was far worse than its first half. Is Scott Lynch becoming a crappier writer over time?
“The first four-hundred pages of the novel are spent writing checks the last four-hundred can’t cash.”
I suspect laziness. The plot again does not satisfy. Lynch sets up a story about a tower heist involving a casino owner and rare art collector with a giant vault, an archon military commander competing with a set of bureaucrats, more Bondsmagi meddlers, multiple turncoats and spies, and yes, a network of pirates with Locke and Jean inexplicably in the middle of their disputes, and then he connects them… poorly. It’s just convoluted. The story forces you to accept that the brilliant archon Maxilon Stragos would force Locke and Jean to sail away from the new base city of Tal Verrar to stir up pirate conflicts even though it’s counterproductive to his role as a leader, he’s never met the thieves before, and, by everyone’s admission, they have no sailing knowledge or pirating skills. Then you have to accept that he’s able to do this because an alchemist poisons the pair with a latent no-symptom, long-lasting potion for which they need to receive periodic antidotes. Furthermore, the threat of the Bondsmagi from the first lingers on, the insidious magic wielders having tracked the pair to their new destination (even though they sailed away from Camorr to get free of them) and now plan to torment them by forcing them into high risk political games instead of outright killing them. The heroes are pushed around throughout the whole book, acting out of necessity, trying simply to not die on almost every single page. If there was any clever planning and one-upmanship left in Locke Lamora from the first entry of the Gentlemen Bastards series, it’s been squelched into nonexistence in Red Seas Under Red Skies.
The first four-hundred pages of the novel are spent writing checks the last four-hundred can’t cash. The nature of the connections between the various groups has to be explained through exposition and Locke and Jean’s role is never vital. Requin and Selendri should kill them when they have chances and consider doing so. The pirates should kill them when they have the chance and consider doing so. Stragos should kill them when he has the chance and considers doing so. The Bondsmagi should kill them, and presumably always can. The Priori should have succeeded at killing them (that they didn’t indicates a shocking degree of incompetence). Maybe Lynch thought it was funny that everyone wanted to kill them, should have killed them, and didn’t. I don’t know. But it didn’t work as a compelling plot. And when the novel does get around to resolving some of the conflicts, it’s again the brute-force method with the pirate ship warfare between Zamira and Radanoff, the brute-force method of capturing the archon and having Merrain attack the alchemist, and a really simple and far-from-foolproof heist for Requin that goes from unsatisfying when you discover they’re not robbing his vault to extremely unsatisfying when you discover the paintings they took are forgeries.
The characters have gotten worse as well. Locke’s charm seems to have faded between entries. His alternate personas are no longer the unique strength that defines his being but rather a simple parlor trick like his sleight of hand card games. The fact that he has many different names doesn’t actually mean I’m convinced he’s behaving differently when using those names, and the confusion of everyone about what to call him should have clued Lynch to this problem. Jean’s fighting prowess has transitioned to legendary status, so there’s little substantial threat any of the many many times they get into fights for their lives. And the lesser characters in this entry are not nearly as good as Bug, Calo, Galdo, Father Chains, Capa Barsavi, The Thiefmaker, or the other side characters of The Lies of Locke Lamora. I liked Zamira to some extent, especially whenever she balances pirate captaining and mothering. The first mate and Jean lover Ezri felt like a blend of too many traits to me. She’s all of cute, brash, brutish, scholarly, sensible, impulsive, selfish, and self-sacrificing. Too much to squeeze into her three-hundred and fifty pages, and far too much if she was going to die a la the other Gentlemen Bastards in the last ship to ship battle. I could hardly keep track of the other pirates. The archon and Requin, though holding opposing offices in Tal Verrar, were essentially the same character type. And Merrain is too mysterious to be anything other than a Bondsmage-esque antagonistic figure.
With the established thief lair and band of thieves of the first book fully removed, Locke and Jean are entirely afloat. Their actions, in the rare instances where they’re hands aren’t forced, feel irresponsible. They don’t seek to contact Sabetha yet again! They don’t want to recruit more members. They don’t want to find a new home. By their own admission they either want to wallow in their misfortune or get into more trouble because, “for some only a prize worth dying for makes life worth living.” A thrill-seeker that gets his friends killed is not a sympathetic character, and Locke and Jean’s continued demonstration that they are unflinchingly loyal to each other at least, grows really old when it’s reiterated for the twentieth time. So the novel is kind of a flop thematically too.
I maintain that Lynch is great at fantasy elements and settings, but because the characters spend so much time generically “at sea” and because they’re bounced between multiple cities, I didn’t fall in love with any place as much as I did with Camorr. I believe in the potential of Tal Verrar and The Ghostwind Isles though. I like the big towers of The Sinspire and Mon Magisteria. I really wished the Midden Deep was actually visited because it sounded cool. I loved the Elderglass breakwaters and The Golden Steps. And whatever ghostly things inhabit The Sea of Brass and the waterways by Port Prodigal are a fun addition to the story, interestingly intertwine with the human characters limited by human capabilities and technologies, and provide a good lingering grand mystery.
Lynch’s flashbacks don’t work well in this story because there’s not that much to flashback to. And his use of split narrative is appalling. The first page describes a situation with Jean betraying Locke, essentially the most important revelation the story could have. Lynch writes:
“Locke stared at the steel-tipped point of Jean’s quarrel, his mouth open in disbelief. The world around him seemed to fade to that tiny reflection of the inferno blazing in the anchorage behind him. Jean would have given him a hand signal if he were lying… Where the hell was the hand signal?”
That appears on page 3 and page 633. In the background of this betrayal is a flaming ship. That six-hundred and thirty page chunk of text between when Lynch teases this future and actually gets there is spent with the reader wondering A) what ship is on fire, why, and what does that mean for all of these pirate conflicts, and B) how could Jean possibly be betraying Locke. Here are the answers: A) some random ship. It’s a never-before discussed Tal Verrar holiday where they burn ships as a traditional celebration, and B) Jean isn’t betraying Locke. There is a hand signal indicating it’s a simple ploy, but Locke just didn’t see it. BOOO! Not only are split narratives plaguing stories these days, but this one is just the worst kind, a false-facing for the reader that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
Red Seas Under Red Skies has some fine swashbuckling moments, snappy dialogue, and a generally fast-pace with a substantial amount of content, but Lynch has proved with it that he either doesn’t know how to or doesn’t care to keep the promises he makes with his plots and his characters, and much like Locke doesn’t act on his strengths as a thief, Lynch doesn’t act on his strengths as a storyteller. In the end, Locke and Jean are in precisely the same place they were at the end of the first entry, literally and developmentally. They’re on a boat, destination unknown, with Locke and his thief tools, Jean and his hatchets, a moderate amount of gold, still loyal friends, still without a crew and a home. For however much Lynch has disappointed me, I feel connected to the world he created somehow, and can see myself coming back in a while to read The Republic of Thieves. I just hope he takes more time to carefully plot the whole thing before jumping into the deep end because otherwise he’s going to continue to get lost in bloody red seas under hazy red skies.
