Lexicon

April 8, 2013
The fate of humanity is at stake in this ambitious satirical thriller from Australian author Barry (Machine Man). Picked off the streets of San Francisco after displaying a “natural aptitude” for persuasion, 16-year-old magician/hustler Emily Ruff joins a group of prodigies at “the Academy,” where “poets” learn the magic of controlling others’ minds with words. Meanwhile, hapless Wil Parke, the key player in an internal war between highly trained poets called Eliot and Woolf, is the only person known to survive the infamous “bareword” Woolf set loose in Broken Hill, Australia, two years before—an event that killed thousands and wiped Wil’s memory clean. Eliot believes Wil to be the only one capable of stopping this word that “can persist... like an echo,” and is determined to use Wil in his quest to elucidate the word’s elemental code. Emily’s story and Wil’s story converge in a violent denouement that amuses as much as it shocks.

April 5, 2013
The entire town of Broken Hill has been killed off by a deadly weapon: a word. And it seems as though the word is still in there. Only one man survived the attack on Broken Hill, but he doesn’t remember a thing. All Wil knows is that he’s suddenly being forced into violent situations, and that he’s supposed to believe there’s a ‘poet’ on the loose who is out to get him. This is a ‘high concept’ action-packed narrative, somewhere between Andrew McGahan’s Underground or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, and a Hollywood thriller like Inception. There are layers of social commentary regarding privacy, surveillance, user-targeted content, and more; and there’s an overriding theme of persuasion. Words can persuade, but there are also invisible forces working behind the scenes, creating, shaping and teaching this language of persuasion. They ‘test’ words, like a company would test products or government weapons. Barry is careful, in his books, not to make the satire heavy-handed; Lexicon is a fast-paced read. It’s difficult to guess what’s going to happen, and the reader is particularly invested in a young character called Emily, who (in an almost Harry Potterlike way) is learning just how powerful the world of words can be.

Angela Meyer is a writer, reviewer and former acting editor of Books+Publishing