What can I say? It’s been a while and I’m a procrastinator. But roll up roll up! Settle down ladies and gentlemen and give me your attention because it is time, finally, for me to get around to Infernal Devices.
It feels like a lifetime ago, but you may recall that I’m quite fond of the first two of the Mortal Engines Quartet. Mortal Engines and Predators Gold are seemingly easy YA fiction, but Reeve constantly defies expectation, weaves an immersive world that is incredibly complex and vivid. And for the most part he treats his novels with a precision that is so laser focused that laser almost cuts your face in half while your reading. True to form Reeve hasn’t changed in Infernal Devices but I have had some internal struggle compressing this novel into a post that is coherent and not inane babble.
Everything you know is shifting in this novel, and it all starts with one of those annoying literary tropes that sometimes happen mid series: “it’s 16 years later…”
Infernal Devices – Philip Reeve
16 years is a bold move right? It throws my hackles up a bit. But after long thinking and arguing with myself about it I think it works, because Reeve is a very clever writer who is doing a lot in this novel to unsettle you. Infernal Devices is aptly named. This is the novel in the quartet that has made me the most uncomfortable so far, that angry, and that frustrated with character development. Because like a lot of Reeves quirks, this novel is the novel that defies your expectation, it defies your hopes and your assumptions, and it isn’t supposed to make you comfortable.
It is doing something that the sugarcoated hollywood of YA fiction rarely does, it is giving you something that mirrors life. It’ll give you currents to ride that you don’t necessarily enjoy. I spent a lot of time reading this book almost overshadowed by my dislike at this shift, and reflecting quite negatively upon it until I realised Reeve is being quite clever. He isn’t giving you an easy third book because this is over half way through the journey of the quartet and you’ve gotten comfortable and there’s a long way to go to make all the narrative threads right and neat. He is giving you the novel that you need right now. He is giving you the novel that will be thrown across the room in frustration. Because life isn’t linear and will always subvert your expectations.
Hester and Tom have settled on their private island, a backwater existence, and raised Wren in the time that has passed. Wren is itching for adventure, bored of her sheltered life and has never met a dishonest person. She is old enough to dote and favour her father, who has turned into a bit of a soft pudding with chest pains from his adventures in Predators Gold. But the cosy happy ending we almost had in book two has been a lull and in that time Hester seems to have changed for the worst. Perhaps it’s boredom and resentment, perhaps it’s feeling trapped, perhaps it is self defeating.
It’s never really clear in the novel where this comes from but Hester and Wren do not communicate well, Wren is embarrassed her mother is not like other mothers. Hester is disfigured, blunt and has a hardness about her that has come from survival and her self preservation that has kept her alive at times. But Hester’s self preservation is dangerous in this novel, she is a Heathcliff anti-hero, and all the ugliness of her character is almost overthrowing her moral compass (grey as it may be). As Reeve has shown us many times through this series, parents are still people and they can have some of the worst flaws of all.
So when a group of Lost Boys from Grimsby wash up on the shore of the grounded Anchorage looking for the Tin Book (that Freya still has in her library), it looks to be the end of the lull and the start of an adventure. How this plays out isn’t how anyone expects. Wren infatuated with the romance of adventure, steals the book and is unwittingly kidnapped (dun dun dun).
Tom and Hester set out to rescue Wren in an old Limpet. Wren isn’t a particularly interesting character to me, she is much like Tom, naive and in over her head with events that are beyond her. The first half of the book seems a slow start that is a little lost, and we revisit the sunken Grimsby which seems only to re-establish time shift of 16 years later. This is one of the reasons why I’m not a big fan of that sharp shift in time, we have to spend time exactly re-hashing HOW things have changed, when sometimes it just feels like dead weight and we are resisting actually jumping into the story. But Wren eventually lands on Brighton, is sold into slavery on the pleasure resort and runs into another old character we love to hate.
Again Pennyroyal has found himself a position of wealth and power and of course luxury. Wren becomes a slave in that household and there she meets Theo (who isn’t particularly interesting). The supposedly main antagonist on Brighton is the slave trader Nabisco Shkin who is probably the weakest antagonist so far. I would argue that Hester pushes more of the conflict in this novel. Much of Wren’s story arc seems to settle into gossip and trying to figure out a way to escape but keep out of trouble. I found Wren a little lacklustre after she gets to Brighton, but that is when the rest of the narrative suddenly picks up.
Tom and Hester arrive on Brighton as the book begins to hit it’s stride in the second half and begin searching for Wren. They spend a while familiarising themselves with Brighton and discover Wren has been sold in to Slavery but not where exactly she is.
When the Green Storm arrive searching for the Jenny Haniver, which of course they do, with the once again resurrected and rebuilt Shrike from the first two novels, they bomb the sweet hell out of Brighton. There are Airships, fighter planes and cyborg troops and the most spectacular violence as one of the biggest climax in the series so far. I particularly love the story arc of the Green Storm in this novel while they’ve been a bit remote in the first two novels, in this one Reeve gives us a bit more but that is all I’m going to say about that. While the Green Storm lay siege, Hester is running around cutting down slave traders left right and centre and putting some good old fashioned Hester branded justice into the world.
As always Reeve has given plenty of space to the morally grey areas of characterisation and is not interested in a paint-by-numbers, sugarcoated hollywood adventure story. This is a novel that sees a big shift in the quartet and I’m sure that is a shift that many readers wouldn’t be on board with. There is a lot to dry swallow in this novel, but it is still impressively written and engaging despite some things I do not necessarily enjoy wholly.
Personally I think these books are quite ‘real’, for lack of a better term, in their execution, and characterisation, and in how they defying typical narrative expectations, and story arcs. Infernal Devices may not be my favourite in the series but the it has immense value as a brick in Young Adult fiction wall and again, I’ve said it a hundred times, the Mortal Engine Quartet is something wonderful to apply yourself to. It’s a confusing and morally grey world out there, and I’m really looking forward to reading the last one, A Darkling Plain and finishing it off.
The Shelf Wanderer 