Lexicon - Max Barry

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

It may be a coincidence, but Max Barry's Lexicon bears a remarkable resemblance to one of Monty Python's best comedy routines, 'The World's Deadliest Joke', collected in the feature And Now For Something Completely Different. In the Python sketch, a writer stumbles upon a joke that is so funny that the writer himself dies laughing. Recognising the potentital of the joke as a weapon, it's employed by the military, translated into German under controlled laboratory conditions ("one translator saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital"), and used to bring about an end to the war, although the casualties on the German side apparently were "appalling".

Max Barry's Lexicon however is no laughing matter. If the resemblance to the Monty Python sketch is just a coincidence, it's probably more to do with the recognition that words have much more power than we think. Barry cleverly ("persuasively") includes references in Lexicon to fictional incidents and some historical and Biblical events (the Tower of Babel) that show us just how much trust we put in words, how they seem to make things real and how they can be used, juxtaposed and manipulated to persuade us to believe one thing or another. You need only see how much importance is placed in advertising or have read Barry's excellent Jennifer Government to see the lengths corporations can go to in order to assert influence over our buying habits.

In an age where there is much information ("words") used and manipulated through the internet, through news media and with Google Ads targetted to our personal "wants", Max Barry presents another brilliant science-fictional twist on the themes of power and persuasion in Lexicon. Here, people with a talent for charm are given special training to recognise people's weaknesses and use words to bend them to their will. And what do we call these people with this ability? Poets. Unfortunately, one of their number, "Virginia Woolf", has managed to get her hands on the most powerful word since the time of the Tower of Babel, and the consequences for one small town in the Australian outback are... well, "appalling".

Lexicon is powerfully persuasive in its own way. The concept is extraordinary and imaginative, but it also has real-world-significance and Barry blends this together into an involving conspiracy thriller. I wouldn't be surprised if he has some "poet" ability of his own. It throws the reader into a confusing situation where the reality of what is happening is bizarre and thrilling at the same time, until gradually the spell wears off and the revelations start to come through. That might just sound like a traditional narrative manner of having a strong concept, involving characters and a plot full of exciting incidents and revelations, but after reading Lexicon, you won't underestimate the power of words in the hands of a skilled writer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Image
Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...
Read more

Death of the Author - Nnedi Okorafor

Image
It doesn't necessarily have to, but science-fiction can present us with new ways of viewing who we are as people and as a society right now, how we confront genuine issues that are around us today, how we respond to changes and consider where that might take us in the future. Traditionally, that often that involves our relationship with technology, a reality that seems to be becoming more science-fiction-like every day. There are many innovative ways of exploring that subject and, as a black writer writing about a family of Nigerian origin, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor definitely takes an interesting and unusual approach to those themes in Death of the Author . What is really unusual in her approach to SF is that the futuristic science-fiction appears a side issue to the main story set in a more familiar reality only slightly more advanced than the present day. That's a style more often employed in the genre of fantasy, where they want to keep one foot in...
Read more

Baptism - Kazuo Umezz

Image
Published in France, but not yet in the UK or the US, Baptism  ( Senrei ) is a later work from Kazuo Umezz (Umezu in France), the author/artist of the 1974 end of the world monster horror epic The Drifting Classroom . Created in 1995, Baptism is also a little more refined and paced while still retaining the character of Umezz's classic manga art style. Just as importantly, the story also manages to take a classic horror trope as its basis and do something entirely different with it; a Frankenstein-like science experiment, a body-swap horror that has a typically sinister twist. A famous movie actress from the olden days, Izumi Wakakusa has retired at the height of her career, terrified that the make-up she wears will no longer be able to mask the horrible disfigurement that she bears down one side of her face. She leaves the world of cinema and becomes a mother, devoted to her daughter Sakura. In fact, she may even be a little over-protective. We soon find out why. The only reason ...
Read more