Review: Lexicon

Lexicon by Max Barry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"So, in the moment he was occupied with the horror of his softening leather, she broke the glass against the edge of the table and sliced it across his throat."

Unfortunately this book didn't really speak to me on any level. Insert cliche; "I really wanted to like this one," because I was a bit excited to find an Aussie scifi writer BUT this book just barely skimmed the edge of science fiction. I was expecting a deep dive into linguistics and subliminal messaging, the power of suggestion and verbal manipulation but this is instead a magical fantasy with "thriller" elements. There are magic words, that can be used by magicians (called "poets") to control different people-types. The story is mostly about one poet-in-training who learns, discovers or creates some of these words.

I don't know, the rest is all a bit murky for me. Two stories are told which will of course eventually intertwine and some magic words are learned and employed to cause great amounts of suffering and largely unintended overkill. You might enjoy this story if you enjoy visceral carnage.

For me there were two things that held me through the story. The first was the foolish and mistaken belief that all of the magic would be explained away in a grand, Nye-style "moment of science." The second was the much more compelling love story, which is weird coming from me, I don't generally do romance stories for the sake of romance stories but I liked the irrational, persistent "power-of-love" vibe and especially liked the way it went into the ending.

So, I think that most readers, especially fantasy readers, will like this more than I did. But perhaps it did speak to me just a little on the topic of love after all.

My library has this as an audiobook from Dreamscape Media. I listened to that version and the narration was fine but not great, which may have played a part in my ultimate response.

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