Review: The One, John Marrs
With multiple separate storylines and a love of twists and cliffhangers, The One has a lot of potential to deeply examine ideas about love and science.
Books that have over 100 chapters but less than 500 pages usually mean one thing: what I like to call the James Patterson effect. He’s not the only author who does this, but it’s hilariously common in his books: one-to-two-page chapters and sudden bomb drops practically in every chapter. What’s particularly funny is that John Marrs, in The One, actually namechecks Patterson for twists, but then proceeds to do basically both of those things in his own novel.
Conceptually, The One is not unlike Black Mirror‘s “Hang the DJ,” a favorite around Culturess and a comparison that even press materials given to this writer by Hanover Square Press made, both quoting a review from the Peterborough Telegraph and in an interview with Marrs himself. Basically, science (in this case, genetics) helps determine your ideal soulmate — your Match. Marrs follows five people, some single, some not single, and what happens when they take the test.
But, like Black Mirror, everything goes horribly wrong in the book equivalent of the first act. Whether it’s being Matched to a man rather than the woman a character’s with, or finding that a Match has terminal cancer, or a serial killer (yes, really) being Matched to a police officer, or the head of the company finally meeting her own Match, or a Match being dead, Marrs balances five separate plotlines. Consequently, they don’t feel like they have enough to develop on their own aside from the multiple bomb-drop reveals. Some of them could probably carry a book all on their own, really.
That certainly doesn’t stop the book from being readable — far from it. Those same twists and developments contribute to The One being quite fast-paced. Readers quite literally can’t linger with any one main character at any given time. Unfortunately, that makes it tougher to relate to them, and ultimately, this reader found herself most intrigued by the serial killer storyline because there was a real idea there, with something remotely resembling actual tension and character development.
While some may find the lack of explanation of this genetic coding a fault, science fiction-influenced works don’t have to explain everything all at once, and the Matching itself is less the point than what happens because of those Matches made. Marrs seems to be trying to investigate how love and science can interact, and ends up ultimately somewhere in the middle — that sometimes Matches lead to good things, and sometimes they’re bad.
Next: Review: Outpost, W. Michael Gear
But unlike an episode of Black Mirror, The One tries to spell things out just a little too much when it comes to its point. At its best, Black Mirror leaves you haunted and thinking long after you’re finished with an episode. The One, although it strikes the same bittersweet notes, seems like it’s more designed to give you a temporary kick and nothing more.