Oct 22 2007
_Lies_ and Narrative Structure
I’m over halfway through The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. I’m always curious in F debut novels to see what element might have caught the notice of the publisher. So far, the world of Lies is incredibly vivid; the story is a ripping yarn in the best classic F thief-tale style. But the shallow POV and the narrative structure are driving me nuts.
The alternating chapters of boyhood-Locke’s coming of age and grownup-Locke’s scheming leave me feeling jerked around. The boyhood stuff is solid, and the chapters are cleverly ordered so the timelines compliment each other. But every time I finish one of the current chapters, I hate to have the plot interrupted by another boyhood interlude.
The shallow omni POV also leaves me feeling distant from the characters. I don’t mind a narrative zoom-in or zoom-out at the start or end of a scene, telling me something outside the character’s view (like an unseen pursuer tailing our heroes). The POV at least head-hops smoothly from one character into another in the same scene, rather than abruptly. But I’m constantly distracted by the huge quantities of arbitrarily withheld information — things that Locke and the other POV characters obviously know but the author is artificially hiding from the reader to maintain suspense.
This all combines to make the narrative feel extremely distant to me. The POV does describe the characters’ simple emotions and physical reactions, but except for that, it feels almost cinematic.
Maybe it’s the back-cover comparison to Ocean’s Eleven that sparked this thought, but I think what Lynch has done is write a prose movie. His shallow POV communicates the characters’ basic inner thoughts, the same things shown in an actor’s gestures and expressions. Information that the protagonists know is withheld, just like in a movie, so the reader is surprised at the later revelations.
As a proponant of the limited third-person POV, I’m not sure how I feel about this. Limited-third evolved as a response to the rise of movies and TV–a way to get inside a character’s head that those visual formats could not achieve. Lynch isn’t so much regressing to the authorial omni POV of Tolkien and Lewis, but presenting his story in a movie-like format that is physically vivid yet shallow in characterization.
But if characters are defined foremost by their actions, is this shallow “movie” third-person all a ripping yarn type of story needs? In this age of F video games and F blockbuster movies, is a shallow “movie” POV good enough to reach most readers?
4 responses so far
I disagree with you about the shallow omni view. Omni, yes but shallow, no. But then, it irritates the hell out of me that close 3rd PoV has become an almost rigidly required PoV for fantasy. I found Lynch’s approach to be refreshing and frequently, grounded the scenes. I did get a bit tired of the boyhood scenes, although they became more integral as the plot progressed. I especially liked how Lynch dealt with magic in his universe.
I enjoy Lynch’s work the most of any fantasy writer since George RR Martin. I guess I’m not grasping how you see it as shallow. There is a cinematic feel to it–but again, that doesn’t equal shallow imo.
I have a lot more quibbles with his second Lock Lamorra book, although it mercifully picks up after a near tedious and drawn out first third.
The POV never took me beyond first-level reactions and into the sort of second-level things that give characters true depth. Why did Locke always want to steal? What did it feel like to earn a mark’s confidence, then betray them? How did it feel to be an outsider from normal society but also an outsider from the thieves’ society? Martin routinely digs into core issues like this with his characters, such as how Tyrion feels to be a dwarf and how Cersei feels as a powerful woman in her male-dominated family. Lynch did not.
I’m not sure why you’re irritated at close third-person. It’s not just the default POV for fantasy; it’s the default POV for all fiction ever since the rise of movies and TV. But with good reason–other than first-person, no other POV can get as deeply into a character. I’ve seen omni in other recent fantasy novels too, including S.C. Butler’s new YA series. If anything, omni may be more common in fantasy novels than in most genres because there are more plot-centered stories.
But the root question I tried to address in that post was, does it matter that Lynch’s ripping thief yarn had a shallow POV? The world was interesting and vivid, and his plot raced along, except for those boyhood chapters. The shallow omni worked fine for the fast-paced plot-centered story–he could have gone deeper into the characters like Martin does, and perhaps made the story more than just a fun read, but it worked fine without it.
This is a somewhat awkward way to communicate, but since I started the conversation here, I guess I should continue it here.
I’m not irritated by *all* close 3rd person pov. The aggravation stems from a phase that I think is actually drawing to an end–wherein in seemed almost required, particularly in fantasy fiction. I love Martin’s series, at least the first 3 volumes, as you well know. So obviously I find his tight PoV to be compelling and fascinating. Martin has the gift for making character’s internalizing interesting, but many writers make internalizing too angst-driven for my taste.
I suppose I found Lynch’s lighter hand to be refreshing. I felt that I got enough clues as to Lamorra’s internal conflicts and issues. Some of it was deliberately withheld, in a “to be revealed later” manner, like his feelings for his lost love. BTW, she does not appear in the second book either, although she has ruined other women for him for all time. So we know his feelings–but not the facts of what occurred.
If you want, I can mail you my ARC of the second book. Then we can argue over it some more.
Yes, it feels like we should be having this conversation over beers in a dorm room.
I agree that good close third-person requires skill, and mediocre renditions can end up angst-y or just annoying. Lynch’s lighter hand did fit the lighter type of story he was telling. I think he missed the chance to go deeper, but perhaps he would not have been able to pull it off.
The ignoring of the lost love I didn’t mind as much as the withholding of details of the thief caper. The lost love wasn’t part of the plot, so I didn’t mind that we never got Locke’s full thoughts on it. But the caper plans were at the core of the plot, and many times when the POV was in Locke’s head, those plans were dilberately withheld from the reader in order to boost suspense. That kind of “selective” POV, not sharing all of the character’s relevant thoughts, always makes a POV feel shallow. It’s very similar to what movies do (think of all the plans Danny Ocean knows in _Ocean’s 11_ that are withheld from the viewer). But it works for their plot-driven stories, and it worked for this one. I wonder if we won’t see more of that in F novels.
Thanks very much for the offer, but the preview chapter at the end of the first book left me cold. I’m all for protagonist struggles, but Locke moping that deeply was too much for me. Kind of like how the dominance of the Grey King and the Falconer in Acit II I thought was overdone–see my other post about that.