Book review: The Word Exchange, by Alena Graedon

What would be the impact on individuals and society if smart phones became even smarter? American writer, Alena Graedon's debut novel, The Word Exchange, set in the near future, extrapolates from today's smart phone environment to the eventual loss of "deep" reading ability and comprehension and thus effective human communication.

In The Word Exchange, smart hand-held devices, "memes", are the principal means of communication. They can forecast an individual's needs in terms of medical diagnosis, social relationships, travel, and even meal reminders. The more advanced memes include neural implant interaction. They also have their own exclusive form of communication, via high-tech firm Synchronic's online "Word Exchange", which becomes the mechanism for the spreading of a devastating global "word flu".

Graedon has said in an interview: "The end of words would mean the end of memory and thought. In other words, our past and future". Her inventive, deconstructed language in places echoes the "Nadsat" in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.

Graedon's main character, Anana Johnson, lives in New York and is an editor at her father's North American Dictionary of the English Language. When he mysteriously disappears, Anana, with the aid of her colleague Bart, sets out to find him. She seeks the assistance of the Diachronic Society, "former booksellers and librarians; teachers; writers, editors, and agents; publishers and publicists; lexicographers and linguists ... translators and poets, critics and readers" who still believe in the power of the book and reading.

Johnson's search brings her up against Synchronic's corporate greed and the increasing disintegration of a society without language. The dramatic conclusion, set in Oxford at the Oxford English Dictionary, highlights, however, the overall structural problem of using a rather improbable thriller framework to explore complex questions.

The Word Exchange is ambitious. Graedon's narrative is littered with linguistic, literary, philosophical and musical references, but the whole ultimately never really coheres. A pity, because the issues that Graedon explores, regarding the interaction of language, technology and comprehension in human society, are crucial ones to ponder.