I ’m surprise Martin Martin ’s On The Other Side got shortlist for a Clarke Award . To be certain , it land a unique narrative voice to the dystopian future canon . But it ’s also derivative and muddled . Spoilers !
In Martin Martin ’s On The Other Side by Mark Wernham , it ’s about 40 years from now , and everything has go away dystopian disco . It ’s like a mash - up of 1984 and Brave New World , as if Orwell ’s and Huxley ’s duel imagination have finally merged : the government keeps everyone under omnipresent surveillance and crush human potential – but there ’s also lots of great sex and drugs . alternatively of Starbucks , there ’s a concatenation of deep brown shops shout out Starfucks , where sex and drugs are pronto usable along with your java .
If that sound a bit nonsensical , well … that ’s sort of the pointedness . It ’s an idiotic future , and we ’re ask over into it by an idiotic narrator , Jensen Interceptor .
Jensen is a low - level governance yes-man , who get it on behemoth hand truck and self-aggrandizing - screen television , and Porn Disco and taking bizarre drugs of all type so he can have orgy at Starfucks . Until one day , he stumbles on a radical of Martin Martinists , the followers of an obscure television psychic who died in 2008 . He go away off to enquire and infiltrate this scruffy grouping of radicals and “ lezzies , ” but then he starts seeing the mystifying Martin Martin himself .
As the Scripture goes on , we start to interview whether Jensen Interceptor actually is Martin Martin , who also may be a guy name Emile who become flat in World War II . In a kind of Scanner Darkly Riffian , Jensen becomes both the police detective and the subject of the investigation , and reality starts to glaze over with fantasy . presently , we ’re not really sure what ’s real and whether Jensen is just a dream that Martin Martin is having as he hover near death , or vice versa .
The other oeuvre that Martin Martin owe an obvious debt to is Terry Gilliam ’s Brazil – Jensen Interceptor is like a much more idiotic adaptation of Sam Lowry , sent out to bedevil poor honorable people in the name of a fumbling bureaucracy . Like Lowry , he endeavor to pilot and apologise the ways of a state that own him and erases multitude close to him , in the name of fight mostly fictitious terrorists . And like Lowry , he weave up suffer unearthly speech about the nature of the United States Department of State and the need to keep order in the face of trench craziness . He also fall in love with a beautiful apparently - unacquainted womanhood in the course of his investigations , and has uncanny problems with the plumbing in his flat , top to a kind of sewage calamity .
If Martin Martin ’s On The Other Side is sound a bit derivative … that ’s not altogether misleading . It does have great moments of brilliance , however . For one matter , I really wish the idea that a television psychic who really starts to march psychic powers would vex the biggest scourge to a repressing government – because Martin Martin can see the truth about the world , including who ’s guilty and who ’s lying , he has the capacity to blow the lid off all of smart set ’s secrets . And it turns out the surveillance state is built as much on protect secrets as it is on chance on what people have to hide .
Also , the other affair I really loved about Martin Martin was its narrative voice . At first rosiness , Jensen is just another moron speaking in next dialect , with lots of reference to random drug called things like “ boris , ” and phrase like “ spank pad . ” It ’s got that affair that a mountain of first - person narrators have , where the reader is frequently way ahead of the main character – specially when he ’s just done a handful of drug and is trying to be fresh . And yet , the teller also has moments of unbelievable lyricality . He turns out to have a endowment for empathy that equal Martin Martin ’s gift for second sight . He ’ll meet random characters and pass a Sir Frederick Handley Page or two imagining what it must be like to be them – at one point , he ’s eating some eel that a homeless person has ridicule , and he ’s picturing what it must be like to be an eel , swimming in river clay and mind your own line , until someone grabs you out and nails you to a board , then skins you active . It ’s a weird trait for a government hatchet man to have , this awareness of the suffering of others .
There were many moments during Martin Martin when I feel the book was reaching for dependable grandness , and it was exit somewhere amazing . And then those moments , inexorably , dislocate out . We revisit the same incidents in the life history of Martin Martin over and over again , from slightly unlike perspectives , until his life starts to finger as tautologic as his name . And the Holy Writ ’s ending , which I wo n’t give away , feel like a major disappointment .
All in all , I liked parts of Martin Martin quite a bit – and I could see why some British critics were so enthralled with it , and why it got that nomination . But my main thought during and after read it was : I ’m quite funny to interpret Mark Wernham ’s 2d novel , to see how his storytelling matures .
Martin Martin ’s On The Other Side
Martin Martin ’s On The Other Side was nominated for a Clarke Award . Read more of io9 ’s reportage of 2009 ’s book laurels nomineeshere .
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