One of Us
Michael Marshall Smith
HarperCollins hbk, 307pp, £14.95
Review by David Kendall (1998)
Hap Thompson lands what must be the ultimate slacker job, REMtemping: dreaming other peoples’ dreams. Nineties slackers sell blood; in the near future they sell sleep. People further up the business hierarchy don’t want to waste sleep on confusing or scary dreams, so they bring in someone like Hap, with his black box. Hap makes good money, not good enough to take his mind off his ex-wife, but he’s doing okay. REMtemping is barely legal, but then he’s asked to caretake memories, something nowhere near legal, and his world goes arse-face. The memory downloaded to him concerns a murder, and the original owner disappears. Hap needs to find his client before anyone becomes aware of what’s in his head. In this future, just having the memory of something makes you guilty, whether you did it or not. On top of this, Hap’s ex-wife is a Mafia assassin; she might help or she might blow him away, and a past bank raid that went wrong has a cop chasing him for revenge. By anybody’s standards Hap’s in the shit, and we haven’t even got to God and the angels yet.
The memory/dream idea has been kicked around the sf block more than a few times, but Smith dusts it off nicely by presenting it in such a matter-of-fact sub noir fashion. One of Us isn’t sf anyway -- think nineties Lad fiction: loads of gadgets, worrying about gender-related morality, and sub Hitchhikers Guide philosophy. It’s all sliced and diced with low level nastiness, which never gets that nasty, and laugh lines which never got me laughing. Hap is so nineties, bonded to one male friend, admires and fears women, and wants to be thought of as a bit of a hard man but lacks what it takes. As for his wife, think Elektra: Assassin in a suit.
Sound negative? I can’t deny I found it hard work. Putting God in didn’t help. Very different to the pared excellence of his short stories. I suspect the acid test to be if you laugh or cringe at the gags. This may lead to Smith gaining different readers for his novels than for his shorter work.