Mortal Engines

[sawyl]

I've been meaning to read Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines ever since I caught the radio adaptation. And now, thanks to Waterstone's recent 3-for-2 on all fiction, I've now made good on my pledge. [ When I bought the book, the woman behind the counter looked at it quizzically for a little while before asking me if it was fiction. My reply? "I've read the blurb and really hope it isn't fact..." ]

In far distant future, thousands of years after the apocalyptic Sixty Minute War, which destroyed large portions of the world and left North America a radioactive ruin, most of the world's remaining cities are no longer fixed. They have raised themselves up on wheels and floats and runners and become traction cities: massive entities that chase each other down. London is just such a traction city. After a decade of skulking in the mountains, its mayor, Magnus Crome, has brought it back to the Great Hunting Grounds to devour new prey and to glory in the processes of Municipal Darwinism.

The day of London's first kill after its return is the day that changes Tom Natsworthy's life forever. As an apprentice historian, Tom finds himself assigned to the gut to assess the wreckage of the eaten town for valuable Old Tech. Reporting to his duty station, Tom is surprised to encounter Thaddeus Valentine, the swashbuckling head of the Guild of Historians, and his daughter Katherine. When a rebel goes for Valentine with a knife, Tom feels obliged to give chase — partly to impress his hero and partly to catch the eye of his hero's pretty daughter. But when he catches up with the assassin, a girl with a heavily scarred face, she tells him to ask Valentine what he did to Hester Shaw — words that cause Tom to be summarily ejected from his home city.

In company with the volatile Hester, who flips from charm to anger and back in moments, Tom sets out in pursuit of his city. Along the way they are captured by slavers, they travel to the free port of Airhaven floating high in the sky and they become embroiled in the politics of the pirate suburb of Tunbridge Wheels. They also meet Anna Fang, the Wind Flower, an airship captain and an agent of the Anti-Traction League, an organisation of static settlements who desire a greener future and who oppose the mindless waste of the moving cities.

Meanwhile, in London, Valentine is sent on a secret mission by Magnus Crome, leaving Katherine at a dangerously loose end. Determined to find out what really happened in the gut on the night that Salthook was eaten and her father was attacked and that nice Tom Natsworthy was killed, Katherine recruits a young apprentice engineer, Bevis Pod, and starts digging into the past. What she uncovers horrifies her. Certain that her father cannot be complicit in it, she and Bevis try to come up with a way to oppose Crome's plans.

As should be pretty clear by now, Mortal Engines presses all my buttons. It has vast steampunk cities, thousands of feet high and surmounted by cathedrals, powering across the land at a hundred miles an hour trying to catch and eat their enemies. It has zeppelins, hydrogen-lofted and often rocket-armed, plying the trade routes between the cities and Airhaven. It features two great political blocs, Municipal Darwinism and the Anti-Traction League, in utter opposition with each scheming to bring the other down.

The characters too are great. Tom is kind, open, optimistic and honest, and unsurprisingly turns out to be liked by almost everyone he meets. He is wonderfully enthusiastic, just as he should be given that almost everything about the world is new to him. Katherine Valentine shares similar qualities, but guards her feelings more closely because she doesn't know which of London's citizens to trust. During their initial encounter Reeve sets up a dynamic between Tom and Katherine that make you suspect that at they'll get it together and go off happily into the sunset at the end of the book, only to subvert in a deeply charming way.

Hester, though, is probably the most important character in the book. She is difficult and prickly, but she's also clever, extremely loyal and, when she finally comes out of her shell, charming. From the first moment she appears, it's clear Hester hasn't had an easy life. Her parents were attacked and killed when she was just a child and she herself lost an eye and was left with a scar running down her face. She was brought up by a robotic killing machine, the Stalker Shrike, who was more interested in mechanical dolls than young girls. She learnt to survive for herself in the wilderness and spent her time patiently stalking her parents' murder, Valentine, only to be thwarted at the very last moment.

Although notionally for children, Mortal Engines is pretty sophisticated stuff and works well for readers of any age — Scholastic have even issued them with delightfully bright penny dreadful adult covers. I think I know what my nephew is going to get for his birthday. I just hope he likes it as much as I do.