“Poets never kill,” Nabokov once wrote; after reading Max Barry’s Lexicon, the great man might have been tempted to amend that remark. Before we go any further, a warning: the following review is not entirely impartial. As the author of a novel concerned, in part, with memory loss and weaponised language, this reviewer will admit to a certain bristling of the hackles while reading the synopsis of Lexicon. What the hell did Barry think he was up to, trespassing on my sacred turf – and, moreover, earning solid gold reviews and sales into the bargain?

But paranoid outrage gave ground to envy, once Barry’s tight prose began to work its magic. The similarities with Incarnadine, this reviewer discovered, are no more than superficial. Lexicon is a commercial SF thriller, punchily-written, with clearly-delineated characters and a dynamic, page-turning narrative. The book is very easy to imagine as a film. (And indeed, an unkind critic might argue it already was: two films, at least. Certain plot points seem cheerfully borrowed from Scanners [1980] and The Andromeda Strain [1971], to name but two. Which is perfectly fine, of course. After all: let he who is without sin…)

Where Incarnadine deals in the abstract realm of protean ideograms and weaponised literature, Lexicon concentrates more on the real-world mysteries of neurolinguistic programming: the art of verbal persuasion, essentially. Here, a secret organisation of “poets” learn quasi-magical techniques which will compromise ordinary folk (“proles”) by opening up neural pathways in the brain that leave them wide open to hypnotic suggestion—and turn them into slaves, programmed to enact the poet’s will. The words the poets speak to open up these pathways are guttural, alien, inhuman. (Barry is good at describing the training process here, which involves the novitiate endeavouring to speak these keywords alone, in front of a mirror, so as to become accustomed to their frightening power. They’re almost impossible to articulate, and time seems to slow to a crawl once you start. But poets must inure themselves to the mind-warping effects of these power-words, to be able to use them against others.) Upon graduation, a poet is given a new name—Yeats, Brontë, Eliot— to confer a new secret identity upon them. If another poet knows your real name, you see, they can use it to compromise you.

The first of the novel’s two protagonists is Emily: a street-smart teenage grifter, used to deploying her natural talents for persuasion as a small-time card sharp and con artist, who’s recruited by the poets as a potential adept. But her talents are far greater than her tutors suspect; and when she’s kicked out of the school for unprofessional conduct (carelessly using her powers to compromise a fellow student, who then walks into busy traffic), she is exiled to Broken Hill, a one-koala town somewhere in Australia. Emily’s story (set in the recent past) is told in parallel to the present-day tale of Wil, an expat Aussie now living in the US, who is thrown into a life-or-death struggle against the poets when he’s kidnapped by ex-poet Eliot (kind of a renegade Scanner) who thinks he has a Terrible Secret locked away inside his brain—a secret Wil is unable to recall.

Eliot isn’t exactly what you’d call an out-and-out Good Guy, being quite prepared to use rough-and-ready surgery to open Wil’s skull if all other methods fail. Hapless Wil tags along with Eliot, surviving various assaults by ruthless poets and their compromised proles, and an uneasy truce develops between them. Wil, it seems, is almost unique: not only does he have the aforementioned Terrible Secret, but he’s also completely impervious to persuasion. That’s right: poets are powerless against him, as his brain is locked tight against their neurolinguistic magic. This makes him ideal for the task Eliot has in mind: because the Terrible Secret Wil has forgotten involves his hometown of Broken Hill, whose entire population was wiped out when a certain power-word (known here as a “bareword”, something like the Word of God in its destructive scope) was released by a mysterious poet named Woolf.

Wil saw the bareword before escaping from Broken Hill; that’s the Terrible Secret lodged deep in his mind, protected (like his true identity) by the amnesia which erased his memory soon afterwards. Broken Hill was sealed off by the government, citing a chemical spill, but the bareword is still in there—waiting to be retrieved by someone immune to its power. Eliot thinks Wil’s his guy; but of course, dogging their steps is the villainous Yeats, leader of the poet-organisation, who wants the bareword for its handy world-domination properties. But what of Woolf, you ask—the poet who originally released the bareword, and effectively committed genocide against the people of Broken Hill? Woolf, of course, is really Emily: manipulated by Yeats to release the bareword as a test of its capabilities. Wil was once a paramedic in Broken Hill—and also, crucially, Emily’s boyfriend. Now, with all interested parties converging on Broken Hill, the scene is set for a huge showdown from which no-one will emerge unscathed. Has exposure to the bareword turned Emily into a crazed killer—and if so, can Wil bring himself to kill the woman he loves…?

Lexicon is quite annoyingly good. Barry’s prose tends more towards terse snarkiness than I’d prefer, though this is a minor complaint. The narrative is fast-paced, inventive and at times very exciting. The relationships (Emily/Wil, Wil/Eliot) are amusing, sometimes charming, always convincing. The finale is great, with Yeats’s space-suited army goons pitted against our heroes in a tense cat-and-mouse hunt through a post-apocalyptic Broken Hill. And the coda is perfect. On the evidence of this novel, Max Barry is a persuasive talent indeed; small wonder readers are lining up to be compromised.