Lexicon Author: Max Barry | Language: English | ISBN:
B00AEBETMK | Format: EPUB
Lexicon Description
At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The very best graduate as “poets,” and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose.
Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card Monte on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. Drawn in to their strage world, which is populated by people named Brontë and Eliot, she learns their key rule: That every person can be classified by personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately unlocked by the skilful application of words. For this reason, she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.
Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the key to a secret war he knows nothing about, that he is an “outlier,” immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if ancient stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power.
A brilliant thriller that traverses very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data-collection, connecting them to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion,
Lexicon is Max Barry’s most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.
- File Size: 778 KB
- Print Length: 401 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594205388
- Publisher: The Penguin Press (June 18, 2013)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00AEBETMK
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,088 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Around a year-and-a-half ago, I was introduced to the writing of Max Barry with his witty satire Machine Man. While it didn't make me go out and seek his other books, it was definitely good enough to make me willing to give him another shot. That shot wound up being Lexicon, a book that has some of the same magic that worked in Machine Man, but wrapped up in a plot that just doesn't work.
Lexicon is centered on two characters who initially don't seem to be related to each other. Wil is coming home after an airplane trip when he's kidnapped by mysterious figures. They want information from him, but he has no idea what to tell them. Meanwhile, Emily, a homeless teenager with a gift for con artistry is recruited to go to a school that, not unlike Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, teaches magic.
It's not truly supernatural magic, but rather the magic of the power of words. The graduates of this school are known as poets and are able to use language to manipulate people and affect all sorts of events. Some words are just a bunch of nonsense syllables, but have the power to control people's minds. Then there are the powerful barewords, words so powerful that they can raise or bring down civilizations. Essentially, it is all fantasy with a science fiction foundation.
It reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about a joke that was so lethally funny that even looking at could kill; where that sketch was played for laughs, Lexicon tries to be more serious. It is a reasonably entertaining book, but the plot is too muddled to make it a good book. The non-linearity of the story is a little bit wearing, but the bigger problem is in the premise itself. Not only did I have a hard time buying into it, I had a hard time even understanding how it fully worked.
Max Barry isn't the first writer of recent vintage who has opted to create a work of speculative fiction devoted to the destructive power of words; Ben Marcus' "The Flame Alphabet" is a notable, and perhaps, better, example. With "Lexicon", Barry offers readers a spellbinding alternate history work that will remind readers of a cross between a young Neal Stephenson ("Zodiac", "Snow Crash") and Elmore Leonard ("Get Shorty"), that, is truly, to quote Time magazine media critic and author Lev Grossman, a work that is almost the "perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell". Indeed, "Lexicon" is especially noteworthy for its intricate, rather suspenseful, plotting, though exhibiting far less sophistication than anything I have read from the likes of Graham Greene, John Le Carre or China Mieville, but still displaying more than enough to keep readers in suspense until the very end. To his credit, Barry offers readers a novel that is almost as compelling a novel of ideas, as it is of fast-paced action; however, his level of sophistication, especially with regards to his world building of the "poets" and their secret history, pales in comparison with the best I have seen from the likes of Neal Stephenson ("The Diamond Age", "Anathem"), China Mieville ("The City and the City", "Kraken", "Embassytown"), Paolo Bacigalupi ("The Wind-up Girl"), Matt Ruff ("Bad Monkeys", "The Mirage") and William Gibson ("Neuromancer", "Count Zero", "Idoru"), to name but a few.
Lexicon Preview
Link
Please Wait...