Martin Martin’s On The Other Side

By Mark Wernham

Martin Martins On The Other Side by Mark WernhamIt’s always interesting when the Arthur C Clarke Awards roll around. Not so much the long list which usually contains everything everyone expects it to, but for the short list, which always raises an eyebrow or two as there’s inevitably something a bit out of left field on it. For me, this year, Martin Martin’s On The Other Side, the debut novel of former music and lifestyle journalist Mark Wernham, was the eyebrow raiser.

The story revolves around a low-level government employee called Jensen Interceptor, who spends his days carrying out market research for the government and his nights with his mate Fyodor getting off his face on ‘Boris’, the powder of choice for the beautiful people and going to ‘Starfucks’ and having wild, crazy sex. Either that or he’s at home watching monster trucks or upskirt porn disco on his big TV. Jensen is brash, foul mouthed and uncultured, hates old things, likes new, shiny things and thinks everything is “fucking great”.

One day, while out running a compulsory government focus group he comes across Reg. Jensen starts asking him questions about 15+ meals and Pepso Nouveau and Reg has no idea what he’s talking about, which raises alarm bells for Jensen because he cannot conceive of not knowing that Pepso Nouveau is better than old Pepso, because it’s newer, so he marks Reg as ‘suspect’. Pretty soon afterwards, he’s recruited into the security department to investigate Reg and the group of ‘Martin Martinists’ he meets with. Martin Martin was a TV psychic who, it transpired, had real psychic ability and, after causing nationwide riots by broadcasting some very dirty secrets to the world, was murdered by the government.

That the world we are reading about is a dystopia we understand from the get-go, not because of the resolutely upbeat Jensen who thinks everything is “fucking great” but because our own reaction to Jensen’s narrative is to wince and recoil in horror. His is a world of the lowest common denominator, where everything is pre-packed, approved, sanitised, the sharp edges rounded off, a security state dominated by rampant consumerism and ubiquitous CCTV cameras and where the Prime Minister is presented skateboarding and shaking hands with a banana because it’s all “fucking funny” and we wouldn’t want people to think they had anything to worry about. Interesting, I guess, but not new.

The first-person narrative is heavy on crass, mockney slang and replete with expletives, the way I imagine Jamie Oliver to be when the cameras stop rolling, and while his crassness is at times funny, the continual Ali G-esque argot grates after a while making it hard to wade through; having said that, dipping in and out of it in third person would probably have been even harder so it’s probably a small mercy. The fact is, Jensen is an idiot, his mate is and idiot and his boss is a better-dressed, richer version of the same kind of idiot, but in a world filled-with and run-by idiots it’s hard to tell. Again, interesting, but not new.

In fact the biggest problem I have with the book – and the reason why it’s short listing surprised me – is that while it’s undeniably funny in places I don’t think there’s an original idea in the book. In fact so much of the wafer-thin plot is derivative that you can practically hear him rummaging through everything from 1984 to Brazil via Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange, pulling out the pieces with which to construct his ‘dystopia by numbers’. Then, when the story drifts into an almost psychedelic trip where Jensen ‘becomes’ Martin Martin for while in order that the story can quickly resolve itself, you know that Philip K Dick is spinning in his grave.

It’s a shame because there are some interesting ideas that could have been explored further. There’s no mention of parents or siblings and Jensen talks about his childhood several times, inferring that he was brought up in a kind of baby school which might have explained his lack of knowledge and childlike fascination with things not from his ‘world’ and why nobody aspires to be anything other than a better paid, more important version of what they are. Also, getting some balance between the techno-enslaved ‘haves’ of Jensen’s world and the ‘have nots’ of the more traditional Martin Martinists’ world would have made for interesting reading.

However, despite its shortcomings, Martin Martin’s On The Other Side remains an enjoyable read. Jensen’s narrative contains several memorable one-liners and, while the writing creaks a bit here and there, it is generally possessed of good momentum and shows enough deft touches that Wernham is definitely a writer worth keeping an eye on. If he manages to find his own voice with his next offering, he might just do more than make the ACCA short list.

Martin Martin’s On The Other Side is published by Vintage Books and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.

Mark Wernham has online things.