The Power of Words

I have been a bit lax in keeping my writing up-to-date with my reading.  I have read three books in the past couple of weeks:  Champion by Marie Lu (#3 in the Legend series), Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, and, the subject of this post, Lexicon by Max Barry.

The Power of Words.

This is really the most basic way to sum up what Max Barry has created in this book.  What would you think if you were presented with the following questions?

1. Are you a cat person or a dog person?
2. What is your favorite color?
3. Pick a number between 1 and 100.
4. Do you love your family?
5. Why did you do it?

Based on these five questions, a clandestine organization--the Poets--is able to assess a person's aptitude for becoming a member of said organization.  Through their training, Poets are taught to assess a person's psychological type (there are 220, or so), and through that assessment, know what words can be used to persuade, or even control, that individual.  Thus:  the power of words.

It is through this assessment and training that Emily Ruff becomes Virginia Woolf (and trust me, many are afraid of her), and becomes part of a chain of events that release the most powerful word (a "bareword") upon the town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia.  What ensues involves T. S. Eliot, William Yeats, Sylvia Plath, and Charlotte Bronte (not their real names, of course), and the fate of the free world (cue evil music).  Oh, and just for kicks, there's Harry/Wil, an outlier, someone who is immune to all words used by the Poets.  There's love, there's sex, there's shooting, and there are card tricks.  I'm sure you want to read it now!

In some very small ways this reminded me of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, in which candidates for a special school were also assessed in mysterious and unusual ways and then trained to join a larger organization or brotherhood.  Barry, however, wraps his school in science, not magic (although, truly, is there really a difference sometimes?), and places his characters in our world, not worlds of fantasy.  All in all, I liked this one.  It was a bit different than other things I read, and seems to be a single book, not part of a series (which is refreshing).  This is the first of Max Barry's works that I have read, but it's not likely to be the last.  He has a couple of others that look intriguing, so stay tuned!