Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
Erratum
P17 "…proddel her with his shoe." should be "…prodded her with his shoe."
I love the 'Lexicon' logo. I was attracted to this story because it’s a novel about the power of words. What could be more wonderful than that? Except maybe a story which is about the literal power of words; a story in which certain nonsense words spoken in a certain way can actually control the behavior of another person by slipping past the neurochemical barriers which the mind sets up to filter out unwanted ideas. That's what this novel is. It’s the kind of novel that makes you whine: "Why didn’t I think of that?".
This novel starts out confusingly. It’s done intentionally, but it’s a bit overdone. I can see the point of trying to put us into the confused state of the victim, but there is such a thing as too much! The story begins rather improbably with Wil Parke being kidnapped from an airport restroom by two men at least one of whom is carrying a shotgun. There's a shoot-out in the airport grounds, with some people trying to stop Wil's abductor, Eliot, but in the end he gets away with Wil. Later Eliot seems about to shoot him, but something Wil says regarding his girlfriend (a girlfriend who was waiting to pick him up at the airport but who had obviously betrayed Wil) causes Eliot to have second thoughts and stow the shotgun.
In another place, street-living teen Emily is trying to con people with a three-card scam. She utterly fails to con Lee, because he planted a suggestion in her mind, causing her to fail, and this pisses off her accomplice, so Emily is left on her own. The next morning, after sleeping in a park, she encounters Lee again conducting a survey on a street corner - and curiously asking the very same questions of the people he surveys as did the men who abducted Wil. Emily talks him into buying her breakfast. She tries to talk him into playing the card game again, but he offers her a different 'game' and he says, "Like, don’t blow me" to her, which confuses her slightly and she thinks she's misunderstood him. He then asks her those key questions:
Your name?
Are you cat cat person or a dog person?
Your favorite color?
Pick a number between one and a hundred.
Do you love your family?
Why did you do it?
Finally he says some gobbledygook to her and she feels compelled to follow his suggestion that she go to the bathroom. He follows her in there and takes out his penis, but at the last minute, Emily, who has been thinking he's not such a bad guy after all, suddenly resents all of this and punches him where it hurts most. She takes off running but is cornered by Lee and three other people. She's told that she passed the test: she beat his suggestion, and ends up being offered a scholarship at an exclusive academy set up to train people in the use of powerful 'words' to achieve ends. She decides to check it out, and over the course of many months she learns a lot, including that there are some combinations of letters that, once a recipient's personality type is properly understood, can be tailored to get that person to do whatever you want.
The way this novel is laid out is also a bit confusing. At first, it seemed to me that it’s written in parallel universes, or there are duplicates of various people! Or perhaps the tutors at the academy at which Emily is now a newbie, lead alternate lives. But it was really hard to gage what was going on because the novel was so choppy. We bounced back and forth between Emily and Wil, who are definitely on two different time lines. Wil is being abducted/befriended (it all apparently depends upon the phase of the Moon and which way the wind is blowing) by Eliot, and while his entire story is confined to only a few days or so, Emily's story, interleaved with his, takes place over many months.
This, fortunately, becomes clear as we read more deeply, but at 400 pages, it takes a while for all the pieces to fall into place. Do please rest assured, that this is worth the investment. This novel is outstanding and it’s well written. It makes it worth plowing through some awful ebooks when I can find one or two gems such as Lexicon in there amongst them. This novel has an amazing villain, with whose aims I actually found myself in sympathy at times, although I could never condone his methods. That's why he was a villain for me. I can see Terence Stamp playing him very nicely in a movie.
The hero of the story is Emily, who is as kick-A as any hero I've read, yet she isn’t someone who knocks down doors and shoots bad guys. She isn’t a weapons expert or a martial artist. Nope. Emily has it up top (no, higher than that, where it counts: in her mind. She's brilliant, she's a hard worker, and she wants to learn. She has some serious weaknesses, but she is resilient, inventive, and overcomes obstacles even when it’s time-consuming and painful to do so. And she can talk you into anything without even using sex. I rate Emily up there with Katsa and Kitai, and she doesn’t even have a feline name! Believe me, that's quite a compliment from me.
Indeed, Emily is quite the opposite of a cat, but to tell you more would be to give away secrets! I can see someone like Charice Pempengco playing Emily, or maybe Hansika Motwani, or Reem Al Baroudy. Maybe Tom Green to play Wil, and Matt Bomer or Ryan Sypek as Eliot
Down to Earth again! There are certain people who have been trained to unlock pathways in your mind by the use of key words, which don't even sound like any language you might know. But a short string of these followed by a command will compel you to carry out that command, and even make you feel like it’s a good idea to do what you've been told. I need to learn this skill to use on my kids! All the characters who are skilled at this practice are referred to as 'poets' and are code-named after people who were noted for their writing skills even though they were not strictly poets necessarily: Atwood, Bronte, De Castro, Eliot, Woolf, Yeats. The latter of these is paradoxically both the best poet and the most soulless of them all. TS Eliot is the one with Wil. He was also a teacher at the academy which Emily attended - her favorite, in fact.
Initially Emily does well at school, but she seems to flunk out twice only to be brought back. The second time, she gets to meet Yeats - something she was given to understand would never happen. This is a momentous meeting, and results in her being exiled (or deployed, depending on how you view it) to the middle-of-nowhere town in Australia called Broken Hill.
There are several attempts on Wil's life - or attempts to try and get him free of Eliot - again it depends on your PoV. These attempts fail. We learn more of Broken Hill, and it sounds like some other Broken Hill at some other time, one which has been closed off for the next two hundred years because of a toxic gas leak - so everyone is told. We're told that the rebel poet Woolf said a word there which wiped out the entire population of three thousand, and worse, the word still has power; it sits there still, waiting to wreak more destruction. But is this true? Can it be true? How can a word hang around like that?
One time when Eliot sent a kid, someone who was supposedly immune to the power of such suggestions into Broken Hill, he came back out with an ax in his hand evidently intent upon butchering Eliot - who shoots him dead. The kid was lucky, I guess: we're told that he's the only one who has ever actually come back out of Broken Hill once sent in.
So what the heck is going on here? What happened in Broken Hill? Does Emily need to take on Yeats? Can she even think of succeeding in bringing down the guy who is perhaps the most skilled practitioner of poetic suggestion in the entire world? This is a slow-burn story which brings a solid reward. I loved it. axbagor mrysow xiconn adlere go read max Barry's Lexicon now!
