Lexicon by Max Barry

Published by Penguin Press on June 18, 2013

Research suggests that babies babble the phonemes of hundreds of languages and that parental encouragement of recognized sounds shapes the language the babies learn to speak.  If that is so, perhaps there is meaning in those root sounds that we don’t fully understand.  Maybe the brain has a fundamental language (akin to machine language) from which all other languages derive.  That concept, at any rate, provides a foundation for understanding the story that Max Barry tells in Lexicon.

Building on various “confusion of tongue” myths that explain the divergence of language (including the Tower of Babel), Lexicon becomes a contemplation of words:  how they shape our lives, how we use them as tools to manipulate others, how we weaponize them.  Barry’s novel imagines tangible words that literally have the power to kill, but it’s easy to see that as a metaphor for our use of words to control and even to destroy others, psychologically if not physically.

The story begins with Wi Parkel’s kidnapping from an airport.  People who have taken the names of dead poets are trying to kill him.  Wil has no idea why he’s been targeted.  Has he been mistaken for someone else, or has he forgotten his former identity?  He knows only that this has something to do with an incident that wiped out all three thousand residents of Broken Hill, Australia.

Soon the story takes us to Emily Ruff, sixteen and homeless.  Emily is recruited to take a series of tests because she’s unusually persuasive.  If she passes, she’ll attend a school where the teachers have taken the names of (mostly dead) poets.  The school’s approach to persuasion is holistic, with special attention to the power of words.

The narrative jumps around in time, challenging the reader to reorder the novel’s events in linear time to make sense of the story.  How Wil’s story will intersect with Emily’s isn’t immediately clear, although Barry plants clues in the first third of the novel that make it possible for the reader to guess the truth before it’s revealed.   The novel’s clever construction engages the reader’s attention by adding the elements of an intellectual mystery to two very different stories:  while Wil’s story has all the elements of a thriller (including chases and gun battles and a conspiracy that could lead to world domination), Emily’s is a science fiction coming-of-age tale.  The eventual joinder of the two stories transcends genres.

To the extent that it is a lengthy parable about the power of language, Lexicon strikes me as something that China Mieville might write.  They are stylistically different authors -- Barry uses more humor than Mieville -- but the depth of abstract thought that characterizes Mieville’s writing is present here.  Like Mieville, Barry takes familiar themes (“power corrupts”) and illustrates them in imaginative ways.  Barry riffs on the manipulative potential of the internet and on the insidious nature of online data collection while telling some of the story -- or providing enlightened commentary on the story’s themes -- in the form of IRC chats and online forum posts (including, a bit ironically, posts on Barry’s own online political forum).  He explores the conflict between our dual instincts for privacy and intimacy.  He suggests that we are enslaved by primal desires in the same way that words hold us in bondage.

Lexicon isn’t as purposefully goofy as some of Barry’s other novels, but like his other works, moments of humor lighten a serious theme.  It’s possible to put all of the deep thinking aside and enjoy Lexicon as an ingeniously plotted amalgam of genre stories:  romance and science fiction and action/adventure and mystery/thriller.  It’s better to appreciate Lexicon on each of its different levels:  for its humor, its excitement, and its ability to stimulate thought about the magical power of words (even words we don’t recognize or consciously understand ) to influence our lives.

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