Spares [Paperback]

This is the story of Jack Randall, a man who has managed to destroy his life so completely that he's found himself stuck as the janitor of a Spare Farm. His wife and child have been murdered, girlfriend obliterated in a gang attack in the city of the New Richmond, his old home is a cesspool of people who want him dead. Or worse. But despite being a drug-idled, cheating, corrupt ex-cop and once an even more addicted soldier, Randall still has a heart: he lets the Spares out of their cages, starts teaching a group of them how to be 'human', as he sees it. Off the drugs, and with the help of Ratchet, a service droid and probably the most human character in this world, Randall decides to free the Spares... But someone has different ideas and Randall's road to salvation will take him deep into his own past, the past he's fought so long to avoid.

The structure and themes, Smith's insight and his wonderful sense of humour all bring to mind his debut 'Only Forwards', another great book. But it is still 'Spares' that strikes me as the better book: in 'Spares' Smith has allowed himself much greater scope to inflict his imagination on the world.

Smith's instinct for horror permeates greater than simple shocking scenes; he can invent concepts so frightening they can only be inevitable. At the Farm we are introduced to the Spares, cloned humans kept in caves without human contact - until the human they were cloned from has an accident and needs a replacement organ. On this level, the only work I can compare it to is Aldous Huxley's brilliant 'Brave New World'.

Even the city itself outlines Smith's vast, ironic imagination: a giant, flying shopping mall that landed one day, liked the view of the riot-torn Old Richmond and decided to stay. The description, outline in the prologue, sets the scene for a brilliant drawn new world that Smith knows intricately, setting scenes from the exhaust system of the old mall to the church the new city's most powerful citizen has built in honour of himself.

Plot, characters, pace, action, setting, themes... everything about this book is a genre-fiction readers wet dream - it's hard to imagine how it can ever be out-done and like 'Neuromancer' it probably never will be. It's hard to understand why Steven Spielberg opted to make 'Minor Report' when he had this on his desk, but perhaps Tom Cruise wasn't happy playing a character as bad as Randall.

Buy it, read it, tell your friends to read it and a few strangers too. Then get Hollywood to make the movie, just so more people will read it.

I was hooked from the first page. The world the story is based in is very, very cool. I now understand the term, cyber-punk. Drug-dealing, gun-totting, nutters living in a high-tech world, populated with scum.

The book is a detective story set in a huge shopping centre. The shopping centre used to travel from continent to continent (it can fly) but broke down and never resumed its journey. It’s a massive self-contained city, 100’s of floors high. The scum live at the bottom and the rich at the top. The detective is the, rapt-addicted, janitor of the “spares” farm. He determines to set right the injustices that the spares have suffered. In doing this, he has to confront his, very dark, past.

I read the book in one sitting. I started reading it at about 11.00pm and was reading it for so long that I didn’t go to university the next day.

I concur with the other reviews on this page. This is one of the only books I’ve read that I didn’t want to end.

After reading this book I immediately went out and ordered 'Only Forward' and 'One of Us' (this was before MMS's books were readily available)

'Spares' is about a man (Jack Randall) trying to give a scrap of humanity to the Spares (clones of humans that can be harvested for spare parts should something happen to their real life counterparts) he is in charge of by introducing them to the real world and releasing them from the farm where they were kept. Jack Randall is a man trying to escape from his past, but ultimately ends up falling face first back into it.

Michael Marshall Smith creates a future world that is bizarre, but also, somehow believable - it all makes sense in some weird pseudo-science way, everything has a half plausible explanation.

I love this book because you can savour every line, there is something interesting in each and every sentence. I love the future world it creates, the character of Jack Randall - the way he thinks and talks and especially New Richmond.

You will not regret buying this book, I have lent my (now very battered) copy to several people who have immediately begged to borrow my other Michael Marshall Smith books or gone out to buy their own.

If you enjoy this book can I also suggest 'Only Forward' and 'One of Us' along with the book of short (and somewhat disturbing) stories 'What You Make It' all by Michael Marshall Smith.