Laurie R. King Virtual Book Club discussion
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Lexicon
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Lexicon by Max Barry - VBC October 2018
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Erin, I haven't read this but your review on Goodreads intrigued me - I will have to get on this!
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Thanks for the heads-up. I have read just a few pages and was thinking this was going to have too much gratuitous violence.
The title sounded intriguing and the description on the inside cover even more so. The narrative is twisty, but stick with it and the sequence will resolve itself just fine. I am almost finished, and I can already tell this is one that will stay with me for quite a while afterwards. Looking forward to the discussion. And it’s atypical of the club in the same way as Clockmaker of Filigree Street.
Thanks! Will have to read the book. Sounds good. Thank you for the warning.
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Sometimes it's good to leave one's comfort zone!
Dayna commented that “it’s atypical of the club in the same way as Clockmaker of Filigree Street.” Great — loved that book. I have enjoyed almost every book. Am reading Lexicon aloud to my partner, so I will fall behind, but reading others comments will alert me to the details I want to notice.reply | flag *
Twisty is right! I'm not very far into it, but I'm finding a lot of "what the heck is going on here?" as well as "who's the good guys or bad guys anyway?" Or are there any good or bad guys? Will keep reading!
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I'd say this is really the crux of the story!
The theme reminds me of The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet. It's somewhat harder going but also lots of fun. The characters are all people like Derrida and Foucault.
Emily wrote: "The theme reminds me of The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet. It's somewhat harder going but also lots of fun. The characters are all people like Derrida and Foucault."Emily, that book sounds like something I would like. I’ll have to look for it in my library system.
When you get to the discussion (if you are not already there) between Campbell and Eliot about the power of the Internet, it sounds disturbingly like season 6 of "Homeland."
Erin wrote: "Oh; thinking about it, I should add a "graphic content" warning: there is an unsettling scene toward the beginning. But it is not really indicative of the rest of the book, so please skip ahead a c..."Actually, I think there is a lot of graphic content -- and I'm only halfway through -- but the premise is enough to keep me going.
I will say that a lot of the issues experienced by Wil -- as the book zooms along -- are complicated by the fact that Eliot seems allergic to explaining anything, and then gets furious when poor Wil has no idea what the heck he means. I'm getting seriously annoyed with Eliot -- aside from the fact that we still don't know whether he is a good guy or a bad guy.
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I think by the end I was most frustrated with Eliot. Because he acts like this big important dude, but he's too much a company man to be brave enough to actually do anything. So it's kind of ironic that he repeatedly tells Wil that he is useless.
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Hmm....I think I had one particular scene in mind as having been particularly disturbing (the one where Emily is recruited?). I don't think I really noticed the violence in the book until others commented back about it.
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I've never seen Homeland, so I can't compare, but I couldn't help thinking Campbell was pretty spot on about the internet. Though this book is a smidge dated, I suppose, because what came to mind is Facebook algorithms and filtering for particular stories.
A friend was just telling me this weekend about some study that people from Facebook published years ago about the connection between viewed content and emotion. Something about showing happy ads vs. sad ads and then monitoring the type of posts those people made.
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I've n..."
Lenore, yes, FB got into trouble a couple years back because they were basically experimenting on users by fiddling with the number of happy/sad stories on their feed. I can't recall whether they were doing this in conjunction with a scientific study or what, but as usual they had done it without asking anyone's permission!
Well, goodness, yes, it certainly does push me out of my comfort zone. I found it at first to be a mix of Shaun of the Dead and X-men and thought I might throw it out of the window. BUT I kept coming back to it and wondering what the heck the author was telling us in this this extended allegory... I very much enjoyed it but did not like the ending, I would have liked it to be be more in keeping with the tone of the majority of the book. (Hope that is oblique enough for those currently reading it).
It took me a while too to understand both who the characters were in the bigger picture and sort out the timeline (which I still couldn’t explain to anyone!) . Who is good and who is bad? And because we take orders and do bad things, does it mean we can escape blame and retribution?
It took me a while too to understand both who the characters were in the bigger picture and sort out the timeline (which I still couldn’t explain to anyone!) . Who is good and who is bad? And because we take orders and do bad things, does it mean we can escape blame and retribution?
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Interesting question! Especially since you have people who are following orders willing and those who are only doing so because they have been compromised.
I think you have the nub of the issue in the book. That there are those who buy into a cult or a political theory or even set of other values and who do it consciously whilst the rest of us are being influenced at a subtle level towards one way of thinking or another and we don’t really know it. The author exaggerates and tells a great story to make his point but I find it chillingly near to manipulation we see (or don’t) on the internet.
Erin wrote: "Lenore wrote: "Actually, I think there is a lot of graphic content -- and I'm only halfway through -- but the premise is enough to keep me going.."Hmm....I think I had one particular scene in min..."
I finished the book but skimmed lots of it because of the graphic content. I don't enjoy it and wonder if all of it was crucial to the book.
I want to discuss the character of Emily, but since we're not to the spoilers are okay stage, I'm going to wait. I actually just writing this so I remember! Things have been happening lately, and I'm very distracted.
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Yes! It was interesting that the story started off with Virginia Woolf as the biggest bad guy, but as you find out more of what's going on, it's clear that's she's been compromised just as thoroughly as all of Eliot's compatriots.
By the end of the book, I really didn't like Eliot. I could not understand how he could know about everything that happened to Emily and not feel as much compassion towards her as he did the other poets/friends who were compromised given who was pulling everyone's puppet strings.
SPOILER WARNINGErin wrote: "...I could not understand how [Eliot] could know about everything that happened to Emily and not feel as much compassion towards her as he did the other poets/friends who were compromised given who was pulling everyone's puppet strings."
It was not entirely clear to me that he did know everything. I'm not sure he fully understood the original compromise of her that caused her to plant the bare word with the kill order. And I'm not sure he didn't feel compassion. He didn't kill her on sight when he could have (resulting in his own death). Rather, I think he felt about Emily as one might feel about a pet dog with rabies -- it wasn't her fault, but she simply could not be allowed to live. (You will remember that he told Harry that a command given with a bare word could not be undone. I'm sure he believed that.)
That said, I thought Eliot was annoying as hell. He never explained anything to Wil/Harry until the last possible moment, then could not understand why Wil wasn't following what Eliot saw as the best course of action. And he seemed to have no compunction, not only about compromising innocents to the detriment of their lives, but even about compromising them to get free breakfasts.
ANOTHER SPOILER WARNING (Yes, I know we're at the 10th, but just barely.)KarenB wrote: "I want to discuss the character of Emily ..."
I know that Emily has poor impulse control, but I do not understand why, after all her careful planning, and knowing what she knew about Yeats and his powers, she did not just shoot him when she got into his office after her return with a copy of the bare word. Yeah, I know she wanted him to apologize, but she surely realized that making him apologize after exposing him to the bare word would be no more "real" than making Harry love her using the bare word. I thought her actions there totally inexplicable.
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But she's not a killer at this point. It's a far jump from people dying as a side result of her actions and full on murdering someone with your own hands.
I agree, though, why go to Yeats at that point? It would have been smarter to compromise his organization out from under him before facing him directly. To at least have some kind of contingency. But I don't think she she really thought about (or even cared about at that point) what might happen to her if she failed.
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That makes sense to a degree; in line with his actions against Bronte and the rest in self defense. But throughout the book he's telling Wil how he has to stop Woolf. And then he says that he knows that she has been compromised by Yeats...so it seems like his end goal should have been to stop Yeats.
Perhaps it's a matter of thinking however many moves ahead, though. Eliot struck me as very immediate in his moves. Just because he is the best Poet, doesn't mean he's the best strategist, I guess.
Well, if I remember correctly, Eliot tells Harry that Woolf is only able to repress her homicidal instincts because she is focused on Yeats, and that while killing Yeats would be a good idea, Woolf has to die first, because if she can't focus on her hatred of Yeats, she will kill others. But how does he know this?
Erin wrote: "Why do you think Emily was able to compromise Harry the first time when she wiped his memory to save him, but not at the very end of the story?"As I recall, Emily comes to the conclusion that Harry belongs to a segment of one for which no code words have been established. She tries a series of phonemes and morphemes while observing him closely for signs that they might be the ones that will compromise him. She works out the code words and then erases his memory. I’m blanking on the circumstances at the end of the story, so I’ll have to refresh my memory on that.
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She uses the same phonemes that she sorted out earlier in the book and then tells him to kill her, but they apparently don't work on him the second time because they end up with a relatively happy ending.
So I was kind of thinking that he didn't actually respond to the words at all, maybe something else instead (Emily's emotions, maybe? Body language?).
ETA: I feel like there are actually quite a few plot holes in this story, but I didn't seem to notice them until after I finished reading and had time to sit back and think about everything that happened. Which is kind of magical itself, because normally plot holes would have kicked me right out of a book.
Erin wrote: "Why do you think Emily was able to compromise Harry the first time when she wiped his memory to save him, but not at the very end of the story?"Doesn't the "memo" near the end by "Robert Lowell" posit that love is a kind of bare word? He was semi-conscious when she first compromised him, and thus not feeling love or much of anything else, but the second time she tried he was fully himself -- the outlier -- and thus both resistant to compromise and able to compromise her through her feeling for him.
Or at least, that's what I got out of it. I wouldn't dispute any alternative theory.
Erin wrote: "Lenore wrote: "I thought her actions there totally inexplicable. "But she's not a killer at this point. It's a far jump from people dying as a side result of her actions and full on murdering som..."
Actually, I think Emily IS a killer at this point, just not yet totally devoted to killing in Yeats's service. She has already caught a reflection of part of the bare word, and thus has a "star" in her eye. Earlier, she nearly killed the creepy guy who was trying to give her money on the subway, but at the last minute she sublimated that urge by thinking of killing Yeats. And she says the only was she can keep the urge to kill in control is by thinking of killing Yeats. So I remain perplexed by her actions -- or lack of them -- when she confronts Yeats.
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Hmm, yeah, you're right. Although! Perhaps she doesn't actually have a true drive to kill with her own hands, since she only saw the reflection of the word? It's a compulsion she can fight.
I didn’t compare the set of code words Emily used in the hospital to the ones she used when she commanded Harry to shoot her. Are they in fact the same? Perhaps they didn’t work a second time because some time had passed and Harry’s segment changed due to his time as Wil, because he was only semi-conscious the first time, and the second time perhaps his love for Emily was strong enough to block the command to shoot her, as someone suggests a little earlier (sorry, but I forgot who and could not look back).
I’m afraid I haven’t read the book with the eye for the detail that you all have (a re-read perhaps) but what is bothering me is why has this book been written at all? What are we meant to take from it? Intriguing and engaging as it is, does it have a message? It has to be more, I hope, than the idea that there are invisible forces influencing our behaviour and that there is no such thing as the non compromised individual, no matter how highly we value our independence of thought.
I am a Social Psychologist, not a Cognitive Psychologist or Neuropsychologist, and I am retired so I am not up-to-date on these issues, but this book reminded me of the earlier scares about the power of rapidly flashed words on the Drive-In Movie screens causing us to buy popcorn at the intermission. There definitely is research indicating people are more likely to be persuaded by certain words. This is true also of gestures, facial responses, and spatial interactions. Research in advertising has been extensive in this area. These are not invisible forces. Research shows that the words flashing on the screen are seen and that we can learn to protect ourselves against those trying to persuade us. One of the best ways to do that is by asking "what is this person trying to get me to think/buy/do?" So yes, we all can be compromised, but we all can protect ourselves against being compromised.
Dayna wrote: "I didn’t compare the set of code words Emily used in the hospital to the ones she used when she commanded Harry to shoot her. Are they in fact the same? Perhaps they didn’t work a second time becau..."...or maybe he shot her but not fatally.
Pam wrote: "...why has this book been written at all? What are we meant to take fro..."One the surface, it’s a good story of intrigue and suspense. On a deeper level, a story about how people can be influenced in ways that they are not aware and to some extent are helpless to. Virginia’s comment about subliminal advertising: Research seems to indicate that if someone was already thinking of buying popcorn the subliminal message may have encouraged a purchase but not compelled someone to buy popcorn that didn’t want it in the first place. It’s like post hypnotic suggestions—we cannot be compelled to do anything that would violate strong moral conditioning.
Interesting comments thank you Virginia and Dayna. It reminds me of neuro-linguistic programming which, for me, is is manipulative and deeply morally suspect and on the same spectrum as the poets use of words. I suppose where the interesting point about this book is that in that world people definitely violate their strong moral conditioning (not to kill). So maybe we should ask ourselves: can that be true if us too? And how can we guard against being compromised ourselves?
I don't think I found the book as compelling as some others, although I did find it a thought-provoking and the plot certainly moved along nicely.Emily seemed to be used as a plot device for the author. She was whatever he needed her to be to move on to the next thing. As I read, I had a hard time getting a sense of the character because it changed and she did things that were out of character as she had previously been portrayed.
I also felt like it was heavy-handed on the message for a thriller. We all influence each other with words every day. And yes, we know about the manipulations of facebook and twitter, etc. and can either take steps to protect ourselves or not.
Or perhaps it's because things in RL are being difficult, that I'm having trouble just enjoying a book for what it's worth . . .
The story itself aside, another reason I enjoyed the book was the linguistic aspects of it. What the Yeats and the othe poets did was to create a language consisting of phonemes that already exist in human speech. Also curious about the phonemes—all English or some from other languages? I guess it wasn’t really a language in the most exact definition of a language but it seems it had vocabulary and syntax at least if not grammar. I can’t recall—were codewords English specific or did they work on someone whose home language was other than English? Thoughts on this?
I went to the websites that were listed in the "blog posts" in between the chapters. Some had the same text as listed, some were dead. No Easter eggs.
Emily wrote: "I went to the websites that were listed in the "blog posts" in between the chapters. Some had the same text as listed, some were dead. No Easter eggs."Wow, Emily, I never thought of that!
Something else occured to me—did anyone listen to the book? I’m curious how the codewords were read. Wonder if that is on the web somewhere?In checking for spoken codewords, I found Max Barry’s web site, which includes a Q & A.
https://maxbarry.com/lexicon/
Oh, this is cool! Take a quiz to find out your segment and who you are as a poet.
Dayna wrote: "Something else occured to me—did anyone listen to the book? I’m curious how the codewords were read. Wonder if that is on the web somewhere?In checking for spoken codewords, I found Max Barry’s w..."
I listened to it. The code words sounded like nonsense syllables.
And I think the words must be the same for all languages (although I'm sure each culture would have more people in certain segments than others, with a lot of variation), because Eliot uses code words to compromise Hussein, the driver in Syria, although we have no reason to believe that Eliot is an Arabic speaker. (The school taught Latin, but not modern languages, IIRC.) More importantly, the "bare word" must be international, as it supposedly will compromise everyone,
And thank you so much for pointing out the quiz, which I somehow missed when I looked at Barry's website! It was a hoot! I took it twice, changing some but not all answers on the second try, and sure enough, my segment changed and I was a different poet.
(It has occurred to me that an interesting (?) party game would be to ask each person what poet he/she would like to be, and why. Or maybe that's only my idea of fun.)
I would expect the sounds on the audio version to be nonsense. Thanks for confirming that. I had forgotten about Eliot compromising the Syrian driver. When I took the quiz, I thought the results showed that I was T.S. Eliot, but when I went back to look again, it said Wordsworth. Another interesting thing from the website: If you read the Q&A, the character Lee was named for a real lesser known poet, who agreed to let his name be used. BTW, I think the party game would be a great icebreaker and fun, but I’m a bit of a nerd anyway.
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I can't help thinking that Max Barry heard that old adage "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you" one too many times as a child and decided to rebel in fiction.