Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
So begins the most exhilarating adventure I have read in a long time. Mortal Engines is set in a post-apocalyptic future, a thousand years after the Sixty Minute War wiped out civilisation as we know it. London, like all cities, moves along on gigantic tracks powered by the vast engines in the guts of its wedding cake structure. To survive, cities must devour each other, cannibalising their fellow settlements for steel and coal and labour. It is a city-eat-city world, a process Reeve slyly calls Municipal Darwinism. To be static is to be prey and the idea of actually living on the surface of the world is repulsive. Only the members of the Anti-Traction League rebel against these rules and they are to be both feared and pitied.
At least, this is what Tom Natsworthy, a Third Class Apprentice to the Guild of Historians, believes. Like all orphaned Kitchen Boys he dreams of grander things but whilst the rest of London is celebrating the capture of Salthook, the town they have been chasing, he is sent down to the Guts to help search for scraps of historical interest. Lamenting his bad luck he almost immediately runs into Thaddeus Valentine, the head of the Historian's Guild, his beautiful daughter, Katherine, and Dog, her pet wolf. Valentine is Tom's hero - an ex-scavenger who has risen from nothing to become head of one of the four major guilds - and he is desperate to impress him. Despite searching in vain for a historical treasure he soon has another reason to catch Valentine's eye. A masked assassin rushes up to Valentine and attempts to stab him and it is only Tom's quick thinking that saves his life. Giving chase, Tom follows her through the Guts, quickly realising she is a girl his own age, a girl with a horrifically scarred face. In order to escape she hurls herself down a waste chute leading to the surface but not before she delivers a message to Tom: "Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!"
We are only twenty eight pages into the book and this comment paves the way for riot of action yet to come. Tom does ask Valentine about Hester Shaw and this sends him on journey across the world, from the floating city of Air Haven to the Sea of Kahzak and on to Batmunkh Gompa, the stronghold of the Anti-Traction League. Along the way he encounters spies, pirates and cyborgs and learns exactly what Valentine did to Hester Shaw. Meanwhile, back in London, Katherine also starts to view her father in a different light.
Both Tom and Katherine are in for a rude awakening in their adventures: Tom finds the characters he meets to be very different from the fantasies he had imagined whilst dusting fossils and likewise Kate learns that people can be more complicated than they at first appear. It is a story about growing up, about see the world through new eyes and it succeeds wonderfully in is. It is also a beautifully observed love story (or rather a pair of love stories). Neither of which detract from its sheer, page turning compulsiveness. Mortal Engines is simply a joy to read and the sequel, Predator's Gold, is eagerly anticipated.
This review originally appeared in The Alien Online March 2004.
So begins the most exhilarating adventure I have read in a long time. Mortal Engines is set in a post-apocalyptic future, a thousand years after the Sixty Minute War wiped out civilisation as we know it. London, like all cities, moves along on gigantic tracks powered by the vast engines in the guts of its wedding cake structure. To survive, cities must devour each other, cannibalising their fellow settlements for steel and coal and labour. It is a city-eat-city world, a process Reeve slyly calls Municipal Darwinism. To be static is to be prey and the idea of actually living on the surface of the world is repulsive. Only the members of the Anti-Traction League rebel against these rules and they are to be both feared and pitied.
At least, this is what Tom Natsworthy, a Third Class Apprentice to the Guild of Historians, believes. Like all orphaned Kitchen Boys he dreams of grander things but whilst the rest of London is celebrating the capture of Salthook, the town they have been chasing, he is sent down to the Guts to help search for scraps of historical interest. Lamenting his bad luck he almost immediately runs into Thaddeus Valentine, the head of the Historian's Guild, his beautiful daughter, Katherine, and Dog, her pet wolf. Valentine is Tom's hero - an ex-scavenger who has risen from nothing to become head of one of the four major guilds - and he is desperate to impress him. Despite searching in vain for a historical treasure he soon has another reason to catch Valentine's eye. A masked assassin rushes up to Valentine and attempts to stab him and it is only Tom's quick thinking that saves his life. Giving chase, Tom follows her through the Guts, quickly realising she is a girl his own age, a girl with a horrifically scarred face. In order to escape she hurls herself down a waste chute leading to the surface but not before she delivers a message to Tom: "Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!"
We are only twenty eight pages into the book and this comment paves the way for riot of action yet to come. Tom does ask Valentine about Hester Shaw and this sends him on journey across the world, from the floating city of Air Haven to the Sea of Kahzak and on to Batmunkh Gompa, the stronghold of the Anti-Traction League. Along the way he encounters spies, pirates and cyborgs and learns exactly what Valentine did to Hester Shaw. Meanwhile, back in London, Katherine also starts to view her father in a different light.
Both Tom and Katherine are in for a rude awakening in their adventures: Tom finds the characters he meets to be very different from the fantasies he had imagined whilst dusting fossils and likewise Kate learns that people can be more complicated than they at first appear. It is a story about growing up, about see the world through new eyes and it succeeds wonderfully in is. It is also a beautifully observed love story (or rather a pair of love stories). Neither of which detract from its sheer, page turning compulsiveness. Mortal Engines is simply a joy to read and the sequel, Predator's Gold, is eagerly anticipated.
This review originally appeared in The Alien Online March 2004.