Hodgepodge 105/365 - Book Report (The Lock Artist)

Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist (2009) (2/11/17)

It was such a pleasure, yesterday and today, to be able to really dive into the last half of this book, after a month with little time—or energy—to read.

The Lock Artist is a thriller of sorts, narrated by a mute "boxman," or safe-breaker, named Michael. His muteness is not physical, but psychological: when he was eight, he suffered a trauma—which is told about in detail only about fifty pages from the book's end—and he has not spoken since. Michael tells us at the outset that he is in prison, twenty years later. The bulk of the book outlines a year in his life when he was seventeen and eighteen—so, ten years earlier. Just a normal high school kid, with an aptitude for drawing. And also for picking locks and divining safe combinations. The sort of talent that can get you into trouble.

He tells the story by weaving back and forth in time, which is occasionally confusing when it comes to small details, but they're so small that you end up not caring, plus you know that Michael will eventually fill the details in. He's good about that. I enjoyed the narrative device.

The writing is consistently top notch, especially the dialogue. Where the book lacked, perhaps, was in scene setting—it mostly takes place in 1999/2000, but it could have taken place anytime for all it does not go into social/cultural/technological specifics (except the use of pagers). And although I had sympathy for Michael, he is a distant character, no doubt because of that muteness: we hear what's going on in his head as a novel way of relating conversations, for example, so we know what and how he thinks, but he's oddly unemotional. That goes with his character, of course. But it doesn't create a feeling of intimacy, and I missed that. Then too, most of the characters are crooks, who don't exactly invite others into their hearts.

If you want to know exactly how a safe-cracker cracks a safe, this book tells you. But it's decidedly not a technique only; it is very much an art, a way of listening and feeling. Michael does a good job of explaining that.

Here he describes his uncle Lito, who runs a liquor store and took him in after the tragedy:

I could tell Uncle Lito was trying hard to figure out what to do with me. "We're just a couple of bachelors," he said to me on more than one occasion. "Living off the fat of the land, eh? What do you say we go to the Flame and get a bite to eat." As if the Flame's food qualified as the fat of the land. We'd sit in the booth and Uncle Lito would run down his day to me in great detail, how many bottles of this or that he sold and what he needed to reorder. I'd sit there completely silent. Of course. Whether I was really listening to him, it didn't seem to matter much. He just kept up his end of a one-sided conversation, pretty much every waking moment. . . .
     This habit of his, this jabbering on and on all the time . . . it's the kind of thing I'd run into a lot, wherever I went. People who naturally like to talk, it takes them a minute to get used to me, but once they do they just turn it on and never turn it off. God forbid there be one moment of silence.
     The quiet people, on the other hand . . . I usually make them uncomfortable as hell, because they know they can't compete with me. I'll out-quiet anybody, in any venue for any stakes. I'm the undisputed champion of keeping my mouth shut and just sitting there like a piece of furniture.

All in all, I enjoyed this book. Great literature, no; but a satisfying tale, very much so.