Lexicon. By Max Barry.
Penguin. $26.95.
A cerebral thriller – more
thriller than cerebral, although with a large helping of both action and thought – Max Barry’s Lexicon is an intricately plotted tale
of a present day much like our own, except that a secret society of people
designated “poets” (and with names such as Yeats, Eliot and Brontë) have learned that language really does
have power, and are using that knowledge to shape individual people and world
events. They do not have the power of casting spells, exactly, but rather the
power of identifying people with such precision that very specific words, some
ordinary and some nonsensical, can be used to manipulate what those people do.
This is quite a premise, not unique but unusual
enough to draw attention to itself. And the plotting is expert, focusing on two
characters who initially seem unrelated to each other but who draw inevitably
closer and closer as the book progresses. One is a young orphan named Emily
Ruff, who is rescued from the streets of San Francisco and becomes the
top student at the poets' private school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington,
D.C. Emily, however, commits a cardinal
sin by allowing herself to fall in love – which is forbidden because expressing
so deep an emotion leaves a poet herself vulnerable to manipulation. This is
scarcely a new idea – anyone who knows 1984
will remember the danger of allowing people to love each other – but Barry
handles it with skill, and with enough intensity of pacing to distract readers
from the underlying unoriginality of the concept.
The other character of importance here is
Wil, a man without a past; again, he is a type, but is nicely fleshed out. Wil becomes
a pawn in a civil war between rival factions of the poets – and when the poets
fight, their verbal weapons can and do cause the death of thousands of
innocents. It turns out, unsurprisingly but (yet again) in a very well-handled
way, that the interlinked fates of Emily and Wil are crucial for the future not
only of the poets but also of the rest of the world. Here too, this sort of
“apocalypse almost now” concept, with the fate of everyone resting on what one
or two people do, is scarcely new, but as in so many other aspects of Lexicon, Barry’s cleverness and pacing
are such that readers will scarcely have time while reading the book to notice
that this element of the plot has been done many times before.
Barry does an excellent job
of keeping the separate lives and problems of Emily and Wil interesting and
important in and of themselves, and although readers will realize early on that
the two will be brought together eventually in a way more important than either
one’s individual circumstances, the manner in which Barry does this makes
sense, and his propelling of the story toward its climax is handled so well
that even readers who notice things they have read before are unlikely to care
– they will just be too involved in what is going on.
True, looking back on the
book after reading it once makes some of its commonality with and borrowings
from other works clearer. But for all that, many readers likely will want to read it again, because the
whole notion of a world controlled by language is so intriguing. And when you
think further about it, there are senses in which our world is controlled
by language: there are certain words that people simply cannot say, with even a
single instance of a politically incorrect, racially or sexually “improper”
word destroying careers decades later.
Barry does push things
somewhat too far, and some readers will pull up short at notions such as that
of “barewords,” which are so potent that they can bring down civilizations – or
raise them up. The book is also almost completely humorless, a flaw it shares
with many thrillers but one that is particularly
disappointing in a book about the power of words that is, after all, created
using them. Lexicon sometimes seems
to want to be taken more seriously than it is possible to take it – indeed, it
would have been more powerful if Barry had shown the extent to which, in the
real world, words do have the power
to destroy people, or at least their careers (and, in a different sense, to
raise people up, as in the case of politicians and comedians – two classes not
so far apart as one might initially suppose). But Barry is writing here
primarily to engage and entertain, and he does both those things very adeptly
indeed. The result is that Lexicon
transcends its narrative flaws, which include occasional lack of clarity as
well as pervasive humorlessness; rises above elements that have been done
before; and rises eventually to a level of genuine page-turning intensity. It
is quite a thriller – and although it could have been more than just a thriller, it is, taken at face
value and without spending too much time on the might-have-beens, a very
impressive and very well-presented book within its genre.
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