The Tongue Trade by Michael J. Martineck: Review by Paul Di Filippo

The Tongue Trade, Michael J. Martineck (Edge 978-1770532410, hardcover, 224pp, $34.95) October 2024

Michael Martineck has had the kind of respectable bubbling-under career that many writers enjoy—but which they also might ambitiously seek to surpass. (Has any writer ever been truly satisfied with his or her current status?) He sold his first story in 1999, then several novels, with the most recent being The Link Boy in 2017. Good track record and productivity, but not quite enough to get on award ballots and the must-buy lists of fans.

So it’s wonderful to discover that his newest, The Tongue Trade, seems to me to be a breakout book, apt to get much well-deserved exposure and plaudits. (It’s already got a rave from PW.) It’s witty, clever and fresh. It’s got a great stefnal novum. Its first-person narrator is engaging and real. It moves like Wile E. Coyote wearing Acme Rocket Skates (without encountering any of the Coyote’s disasters). The telling is masterful. In sum, a near-perfect package.

But before digging into the specifics, let me compliment the cover artist, David Willicome. Boldly cubist, with a gorgeous palette, his art for this book also perfectly symbolizes the fractured nature of the protagonist. Very eye-catching.

One simple premise: in the future about a century or so from now, the English language has splintered into a babel of jargons, each dialect barely understandable by outsiders. Bankers speak one lingo, firemen another, and dancers another. And so forth through a thousand classes of citizens. Naturally enough, a corps of professional interpreters has sprung up to mediate between citizens. The client speaks only medico, his interlocutor speaks only car repairman, but the interpreter handles both easily. Also, like priests or psychiatrists or lawyers of old, the interpreter is forbidden by oath from divulging anything he learns during a session.

Now, to me, the invention of a new kind of professional or expert, especially one with civic duties, is a fascinating riff, not employed in SF often enough. I can think of a few instances, though. Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses from Stranger in a Strange Land; van Vogt’s Nexialists from The Voyage of the Space Beagle; Philip Jose Farmer’s joats from The Lovers; and Delany’s Singers from “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”. Such heretofore-unseen professionals or guildsmen allow the writer to navigate and explore society in new ways.

And that’s certainly what we get in the first-person narrative of Licensed Private Interpreter William Kirst. We see him among civilians poor and rich, among his interpreter peers and superiors, with his lover—and with the police: namely a certain Detective Bremburg. That’s because Kirst witnesses a murder—then inadvertently allows himself to be hired by the murderer! Now he has the solution to the murder, but can’t reveal it!

Kirst’s explorations into the whys and wherefores of the crime reveal that the murder was actually the tip of a conspiracy and scam. Eventually linking up with Bremburg—who’s Batman and who’s Robin is debatable—the undaunted investigators travel to many venues, exotic, dangerous and commonplace, before they crack the case—at peril of Kirst’s life in a final showdown with the perp, high atop a zeppelin mooring tower. Did I mention yet that Martineck’s future is filled with many nice touches, such as a zeppelin resurgence?

Now, this murder mystery—or murder plus mystery—is entertaining enough, and will keep the reader in suspense. Basically, though, its lineaments might furnish forth a mimetic tale—there’re no super computer chips or great new inventions as the McGuffin. So the real pleasures of the book are watching Kirst practice his trade. Martineck shows a dab hand in inventing jargons and creating semi-surreal dialogues, such as the one below. He also depicts quite sensitively and insightfully the effect on Kirst of having a welter of tongues in his brain. Who is he really, existentially speaking? Especially during a session like this:

“Who’s the biter?” he asked her.

“Q him. I don’t know.” She folded her arms across her chest.

“Got a fill, biter?”

“Will.”

“When?”

“Always.”

“Always what?”

“Always Will.”

“Will, like William.” The girl lost her patience. “Oh,” the boy said.

“Your poke, Roger.” A black-haired youth on the edge of the pool area shouted over, which took some athletic lungs.

Roger sauntered back to the game, giving the cue-stick a flick to make sure the cable that came out of the back, and into the ceiling, wasn’t going to impede his next shot.

“Fill’s Claire.” The girl watched Roger size up the position of the balls of light hovering in green space.

I loved that word, fill, as in what you use to fill in blanks, prompts, or boxes. It’s not necessarily your name.

“Hi, Claire,” I said back.

At one point, the lives of Kirst and Bremburg are saved when Kirst analyzes the jargon of some captors—a jargon he’s never heard once before—and then utilizes it so effectively, he wins his captors over. Now that’s some pretty slick linguistic skills. And Kirst exhibits verbal flair in the standard wiseguy private-eye manner as well.

At that moment, I couldn’t have followed Shakespeare if I’d been strapped to his back. It occurred to me that maybe Bremburg didn’t need as much actor-coaching as I might have thought. He could be trying a friendly interrogation before throwing me in a steel box with a halogen lamp and shouting at me until I busted like a wine glass.

Like Jonathan Lethem’s debut, Gun, with Occasional Music, The Tongue Trade drops us smack-dab without preparation into an enigmatic milieu that at first seems wacked, but is revealed to operate by its own fascinating internal logic. It will consort proudly with Delany’s Babel-17 and Vance The Languages of Pao.

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