Michael Marshall Smith is unlike any author I've ever read. Unfortunately, he's almost exactly like himself. When I read Only Forward, his third book, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed its rapid spiral into sheer lunacy, toward a conclusion that made no sense but that was highly enjoyable nonetheless. Imagine my surprise when I began reading his first novel, Spares, and realized that this book shared the exact same plot structure as Only Forward.

To be sure, they start in different places. The eponymous spares in this novel are the product of every cloning opponent's worst nightmare. In the dystopian future, wealthy individuals have their children cloned at birth; these cloned "spares" are corralled in barbaric Farms until their owners get into some medical emergency, at which point quick surgery on the spares (performed, of course, without anaesthesia) delivers a perfectly compatible replacement body part for the temporarily inconvenienced owner. Because the spares are only useful for the biological parts they carry, nobody feels the need to treat them like human beings: instead, they shamble around vast corridors in various Farms scattered across the country, their well-being looked after by several machines and one human caretaker per Farm. Jack Randall--former police officer and soldier, current drug addict--is one of those caretakers, but unlike the rest he one day discovers his conscience and decides to teach the spares how to be human. They become like his children, and so when he realizes that some particularly horrifying surgery is about to be performed on one of his surrogates, he flees, dragging a frightened group of spares along with him. They break into New Richmond--now a single enormous building rather than a city--but all hell breaks loose when a lot of people die and most of the spares disappear. Randall attempts to find them; he encounters obstacles; and things get weird. Then things get really weird. Then things get really weird.

The problem, of course, is that things get weird in exactly the same way as they got weird in One of Us. Sure, there are some minor differences, but the basic structure is the same: man investigates mystery, secret past intrudes on man, man forces himself to encounter his secret past, and said encounter requires man to go through physical/metaphysical journey through a land-like-a-drug-trip-made-real that has little to no connection with the rest of the book.

Fortunately, Smith is talented enough to make the trip entertaining even the second time around. While his storytelling skills are not quite as sharp as they are in One of Us, he manages to keep things moving along briskly, and he displays the same admirable skill with jumping timelines and exposition that he shows in his later works. However, not all is well: the spares feel less than human (an unfortunate and ironic fault, given their plight), and several deus ex machinas (quite literally--but that's what you get when you have artificial intelligence) keep the main character alive and the plot humming.

Still, Spares is fun, and I imagine that first-time Michael Marshall Smith readers will enjoy themselves immensely. Just don't expect his other books to be much different.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu