Mortal Engines was the last novel I started in 2017, six months later I’m blogging about it because organisation. Ha. There’s been a lot going on – I won’t bore you with it. So. Novel forty seven of last year is one of my favourite YA novels, I’ve had this quartet sitting on the shelf for a while because of my own stubbornness. When you are lucky enough to find one, two and four in charity shops you want to be lucky enough to find three too. I, however, am not that lucky so gave in after three years of hoping to be that lucky and bought it online (still pretty lucky, three out of four isn’t bad).
The Mortal Engines Quartet is sometimes known as the Hungry City Chronicles if that gives you a nice little clue as to what these books are about (if you haven’t seen the trailer of Peter Jackson’s impending film version of the first novel). You got it folks this is a world flung in the not so distant future where cities move around looking for smaller cities to eat.
Mortal Engines – Philip Reeve
There is something about tiered cities on tracks, or flying, or sailing, that really captures my youthful imagination. There is something about air pirates and rebel forces and zombie-robot men and characters flung out of their comfort zones that I really enjoy. There is something fun about this novel, while it can be so terribly dark at times. The narrative follows Tom, a fifteen year old apprentice historian stuck on London dreaming of being an adventurer like his hero, Head Historian and Archaeologist Thaddeus Valentine.
Tom is a little browbeaten as a lowly third-class apprentice Historian and like all good stories gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. As London chomps through it’s first catch for a while, Valentine is attacked by an assassin who’s face is hidden by a scarf. Tom deflects the blow and chases the assassin through the Gut of the London, convinced that catching them will win favour with his hero and his hero’s pretty daughter Katherine.
On facing the assassin though Tom realises she is girl around his own age and her face is horrifically disfigured by a scar running from forehead to jaw through an eye, her nose, and mouth. She jumps down a Waste Chute and escapes leaving Tom confused and mulling over her last words: “Look at what Valentine did to me! Ask him, ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!” (Dun DUN DUNNNNNNNN).
But it gets better. Valentine catches up with Tom and kindly asks him a few questions and thanks him for his help. Realising Tom knows the name Hester Shaw and has seen her face, Valentine then does a Jamie Lannister and pushes Tom down the Waste Chute after Hester.
Stranded in the Out-Country and on solid ground for the first time in his life, his world turned upside down, and everything he believes in up for questioning he finds himself stuck with Hester who is helplessly injured. Watching the tracks of London disappear he resolves to get back to London and on the way, finds answers he doesn’t expect to his questions along the way.
Meanwhile Katherine Valentine is having her own adventure learning her father isn’t quite the man she thought he was and discovers that the Engineers of London have gotten their hands on some nasty Old-Tech and plan to use it. Katherine is a bit of an unsung hero in this novel uncovering the nastiness of London. She seems to reveal the dark underbelly of the novel and the evil that lies at home rather than further afield.
But Tom and Hester are the duo that go further out into the world and find the vicious tone of the world that is sometimes surprisingly dark for a YA novel.
There is something quite elegant in how many of our young characters try to hold on to their belief system while it is being dissolved. Whether that be their belief about the world, themselves or other people. Tom for example believes in the Municipal Darwinism gives justification to cities eating cities yet is faced with the Anti-Traction League and how little he really knows about the world he lives in. While Hester gives him a face to face account of how dangerous the world can be and how adults can and will attack children given the circumstances.
Tom and Hester balance out well, as where Tom naively trusts everyone, Hester doesn’t and is angry, sullen, uneducated and stubborn. Later on in the novel her character broadens with her awful past and her connection with the reanimated-dead-human-robot-killing-machine known as the Shrike.
There is a lot going on in this novel, but it’s a really easy read! Every chapter is a cliff hanger or ends on a question that is answered in the next chapter or down the line in the novel. I love how Tom develops as a character and how his whole believe system turned on it’s head. But that is the novel in a nutshell, Mortal Engines challenges your expectations of characters, particularly with how they ought to be. It also challenges the characters to reassess who they can readily trust and how much to trust appearances and reputation over the actions of the individual. It takes the least expected route with most things, bar a little foreshadowing that some would say is clumsy – but it’s a YA novel and on the whole is very good.
As with most novels I write about here, this one I recommend you read. Unless you don’t like highly imaginative fun steampunk dystopian adventures with sky pirates, predator cities, and undead-zombie-robots. Then don’t. It’s not your thing.
The Shelf Wanderer 