Review

Martin Martin's on the Other Side

By Mark Wernham

Published by Jonathan Cape

‘Oi Oi! Heads up! Jensen Interceptor here. And here is what I have to tell you: my f*&king story.’

Thus begins the decidedly strange adventure of one of 2008’s most memorable fictional creations.

Set in a recognisable but considerably altered London of the future, Mark Wernham’s adrenaline-fuelled debut weaves together multiple narrative strands to create a vision not dissimilar to Huxley’s Brave New World, but linked to the twentieth century via the psychic powers of the mysterious Martin Martin.

Jensen Interceptor (you’ll be showing your age if you get the reference) is a young man living it up big time. Fresh out of Study Centre 16, he’s gone straight into a job in the Social Studies Section of the Department of Media and Culture. He lives in a swanky pad in the Rotherhithe Sky Tower (south London’s the only place to be in this London of the future), and goes out most nights with his mate Fyodor to his local Starfucks for adult entertainment and as many grammes of boris as his nose will allow him to hoover up.

Sent to north London one day to undertake routine focus group interviews with the ‘povos’ and 'mongs' who live in this run-down part of the city, Jensen meets a man called Reg. Dissatisfied with Reg’s answers, Jensen marks him down as ‘suspect’; a few days later, he is called into a meeting first with his boss Brock (‘“You was working on the history-recognition FG inIslington last week, yeah?”’), and then with the slightly sinister Miskin.

Jensen is signed up to work for the Security Department to find out more about Reg and his comrades, but has no idea that this simple surveillance operation will become so complicated and, well, odd.

This is a bold, bravura display of pedal-to-the-metal writing, which in some ways is reminiscent of Jonathan Lethem’s hard-boiled future noir novel Gun, With Occasional Music: both are fully realised pictures of what life several hunded years hence could plausibly be like, and both employ elements of the surreal or just plain bizarre (I’ll never forget Lethem’s gun-toting kangaroo, nor Martin Martin’s stentorian and prolonged fits of belching).

Wernham’s vision of the future – a seemingly free society of contented 'haves' and discontented 'have-nots' controlled by a faceless government project known as the Project (‘It’s all about policy and implementation. The drive for Unity and Success. It’s on all the posters and the art.’) – may not be that original, but Jensen Interceptor is a hilarious one-off, at once crass, naïve, charming, foul-mouthed, stupid, lovestruck and resilient.

There’s stuff here about worm holes and how the past is linked to the present and the future, but Martin Martin’s on the Other Side is really about jumping into your Dermo Shower, getting cleaned up, relaxing on your new seater and strapping yourself in for a belting helter-skelter ride. Know what I mean? Yeah, right.

As Jensen would say, ‘Check it totally the fuck out.’

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

---