Book Review: Lexicon

Lexicon by Max Barry was a great book for me -- a smart, funny, philosophically-flavored SF/fantasy thriller that doesn't bog itself down.  It's always a good sign when I have to keep myself from basically reading the whole thing out loud to Robert.  I always felt very interested and highly motivated to keep reading.  I can readily recommend it to you all.  (I was unhappy that one guy has a history of hunting rabbits, but no bunnies are harmed -- or even appear -- in this book, even in the parts set in rural Australia.)

This book uses the "alternating chapters between current events and the backstory" structure.

In the current events storyline, scary thriller stuff immediately starts happening to a hapless guy who doesn't understand what's going on.  We don't either -- but if you can handle the ambiguity of, e.g., a William Gibson novel, you'll be more than fine -- and anyway, the basic situation (confused innocent, dangerous kidnapper, even more dangerous obvious bad guys) is very clear and easy to grasp.  These sections of the book have a Snow Crash-era Neal Stephenson feel to me.  The story is frenetic and action packed yet leaves plenty of time for (too much) squabbling between the characters.  There is also a sort of mild horror-movie-esque sequence that was really good and creepy and gave me goosebumps (literally).

The only disappointing thing about the "girl is recruited to take entrance exams to what is fundamentally a hyper-elite magic school" backstory is that it jumps ahead too quickly.  I loved The Magicians in part because of the pacing and the wonderfully detailed way the magic school universe and the protagonist's position within it is developed.  You really get the whole story in The Magicians in a way that doesn't happen here.  I kept wanting to know more about how things work, the experiences the girl has, how they learn to do what they do.  What we get of this is great, but I really needed an entire novel's worth of this story.  It also reminded me a bit of Divergent in that the underpinnings of the personality segmentation, and the overall psychological/sociological foundation, was under-developed.  For example, I would have liked to see a more coherent explanation around this magic of persuasion and how the linguistic elements and personality elements intersect.  But I recognize that I have a ridiculously high standard for this due to my own knowledge of and interest in the subject matter.  If you can get into it as a cool idea, and leave aside all details about how it works, the book is still a lot of fun despite not fully delivering on the premise.

Each story is very entertaining individually, but I felt that the shifts from one to another were a bit too abrupt.  It felt like jumping between two unrelated, very different books for a while.  It takes a long time for the two storylines to fit together, and by the time they do, it's kind of too obvious what is going on and going to happen in a general way.  I feel that this structure was not entirely successful and that the somewhat anti-climactic ending could have been better with a more effective integration of the backstory and the current events.  However, I'm not sure what that would look like.  Anyway, this in no way makes me hesitate in recommending the book.  It's not perfect -- and it's not perfectly suited to my idiosyncratic tastes -- but it's still a good ride.